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Weekly Report

Business over Tapas (Nbr 434)

Business over Tapas (Nbr 434)

  • A digest of this week's Spanish financial, political and social news aimed primarily at Foreign Property Owners: Prepared by Lenox Napier. Consultant: José Antonio Sierra

viernes 25 de febrero de 2022, 02:22h

24FEB22 – MADRID.-For subscriptions and other information about this site, go to businessovertapas.com email: [email protected] - ***Now with Facebook Page (Like!)***Note: Underlined words or phrases are links to the Internet. Right click and press 'Control' on your keyboard to access. Business over Tapas and its writers are not responsible for unauthorised copying or other improper use of this material. Subscription and e-mail information in our archives is never released to third parties.

Editorial:

A civil war broke out in the Partido Popular last week after accusations that the Madrid regional leader (and party darling) Isabel Díaz Ayuso was 'spied on' and accused by Pablo Casado of nepotism - of signing a 1.5m€ contract for surgical masks, while her brother took a juicy commission (from the provider, a childhood friend) – which she denied, well, sort of (‘there’s nothing wrong in that’, she says). The ‘juicy commission’, said Casado, was for 283,000€. It was not a commission but a one-off bonus of 55,850€ – Ayuso tartly corrected her leader here.

Ayuso reacted to the accusation by publicly berating Pablo Casado and his lieutenant Teodoro García Egea of trying to poison her reputation 'I would never have imagined', she said, 'that the national direction of the party would act in such a cruel and unfair way against me'. In a statement on Friday, Ayuso said her brother has worked in the health sector for more than 26 years and there was nothing improper in his activities. She also showed surprise that she should be attacked by her own party in this way. She further reminded Spaniards that what is needed is a strong PP to rule the country against the ‘disaster’ of the current government. ‘I might make mistakes’, she says, ‘but never illegalities’.

The party leadership replied that Ayuso would be officially rebuked by the party as 'we won't tolerate any disloyalty'.

Then, on Saturday, a quiet meeting between the two (pushed by the barones, the senior PP circle) produced a remarkable turnaround. I am satisfied that she didn’t commit any irregularities, said Casado; no one spied on me, said Ayuso. Friends again (or at least, an armistice agreed).

Ayuso and Casado were apparently immersed in a struggle (just a few days ago) for the popular leadership of the party, with Ayuso apparently being the militants' choice. It was almost a comic book story. Casado was meanwhile asking PP mayors and regional leaders to support him publicly. Few were prepared to do so (although the Almería local paper showed fervent support for Casado on Friday – a support which had entirely evaporated by the following Wednesday).

In times of war’ says one editorial, ‘one must choose a side’. One’s political future could depend on making the right choice…

A modest demonstration on Thursday night last week outside party headquarters in Madrid showed pro-Ayuso supporters with their ‘Casado out, Ayuso in’ placards. A second one on Sunday was far larger (and full of disguised Vox rabble-rousers claims one source). A leading question for the conservative ECD readers: ‘which one do you prefer?’, Ayuso scored over 97% against Casado with just 2%.

But both were badly damaged by the squabble. Ayuso must face denuncias from the PSOE and Izquierda Unida for corruption. Casado meanwhile had been shown to be a weak leader.

The ABC editorial on Sunday says firmly: ‘Casado Must Go’. The PP can’t wait until the Party Congress in July. ‘This is the opinion of the vast majority of the territorial leaders of the PP, who demand a definitive and drastic firewall as the only remedy to save themselves from a bloodletting’. By Wednesday, he was all but gone.

Is there somebody else the PP can turn to for leadership? Step forward Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

Pablo Casado effectively lost the election in Castilla y Léon, while Ayuso most certainly won the election in the Community of Madrid.

If it were only that simple.

Something not entirely dissimilar had happened in the PSOE a few years ago - with the people's choice Pedro Sánchez winning out over the party apparatchik (Wiki). This time, though, it rapidly got complicated.

But, that’s politics.

Housing:

From Mark Stücklin’s Spanish Property Insight here: ‘Spain’s dying villages get a new lease of life with the Covid-19 pandemic’. It begins ‘Spain is full of pretty villages in attractive countryside that are slowly dying as the young have moved to the cities in droves over the last 50 years. A website called ‘Come Live in a Village’, or Vente a Vivir a un Pueblo in Spanish (here), has been set up to help people move in the other direction, especially after the pandemic…’.

From The Majorca Daily Bulletin here: ‘Donation of properties reaches record levels. For the whole of Spain in 2021, there were 25,062 donations of properties, a record number. In the Balearics alone, there were 2,152, an increase of 43% from 2020 and also a record. The reason for this was concern about increased tax, especially in regions which have typically most benefited from this type of operation…’.

Finance:

From El Economista here, inflation in sharply on the rise. They say that ‘…the worst is yet to come in Spain’.

Five new private universities join a business that has grown by 20% in the past three years’ says elDiario.es here. ‘In recent months, the Basque Country, Andalucía, Madrid and Galicia have endorsed, or are about to, five new private campuses, despite the fact that some of them have negative reports from their own regulatory bodies and fail to meet the minimum requirements required by the Ministry’.

Politics:

Since ‘a week is a long time in politics’, some of the following items may be nudging their ‘best before’ date. Pablo Casado was still the official PP leader on Wednesday evening…

From The Guardian here: ‘Madrid’s president accuses own party leader of ‘cruel’ smear campaign. Isabel Díaz Ayuso says Pablo Casado has tried to destroy her reputation amid reports he hired private investigators’. The paper also quotes the joke from El Mundo Today (a kind of Private Eye) that ‘Joe Biden is to send troops to the PP’s Madrid head office’.

The spokesperson for the Ayuso regional government says ‘When I hear Pablo Casado speaking, I think of Pablo Iglesias’. From El Español. (Heh!)

An editorial from ctxt here, ‘The PP: in addition to being corrupt, are mafiosos. The implosion of the Partido Popular, which exposes for all to see its shamefulness, extends a red carpet to the extreme right’.

But what says Libertad Digital? ‘In a time when Spain needed more than ever a solid and reliable alternative to the threat posed by the social-communist government and its separatist and pro-terrorist allies; at a time when the centre-right was most anxiously calling for political and, above all, moral leadership; at a time when the PP, sorely pressed both on the right and on the left could only seek excellence, Pablo Casado and Teodoro García Egea have dragged their party through the mud, with a lack of scruples and indecency only comparable to their clumsiness…’. The peculiar news-site calls on the immediate ejection of Casado and Egea from the party.

Teodoro García Egea announced his resignation as General Secretary of the PP on Tuesday. The same day, the Mayor of Madrid José Luis Martínez-Almeida quit as national spokesperson for the PP apparently to avoid defending party leader Pablo Casado.

She might be a crook, but she’s our crook… Sarcasm at Meneame.

The Corner thinks that both Casado and Ayuso will ‘get burned’ by the current struggle. The new party leader, they say, can only be led by the Galician leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

La Vanguardia reported on Monday that the four leading ‘barones’ of the PP – Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco and Isabel Díaz Ayuso – are now all agreed that Pablo Casado must go and they have called for an emergency congress…

Alberto Núñez Feijóo – the affable (if unpronounceable) PP president of Galicia – says he would stand as a candidate to lead the party forward following Casado’s defenestration, but only if he were, uh, the only candidate. ECD says that Feijóo wants guarantees from the other pretenders that they won’t run. He seeks a coronation rather than a vote says one observer. elDiario.es says that ‘Juanma Moreno stands behind Feijóo as being the only way to recover the unity of the PP before the elections in Andalucía’. El Español (paywall) says ‘Feijóo has forged a profile as a centrist and one of the first things he will do is agree with Sánchez the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) among other things because he was not in favour of the blockade maintained by Casado. The best way to "combat" Vox’ -says the article in reference to Feijóo- ‘is to reinforce the profile of the PP as a state party, compared to the "anti-system" option of Santiago Abascal’.

The other political parties are all looking forward to picking up new supporters (unless Ayuso surprises us by suddenly going solo). Even Ciudadanos could do some business…

So far, Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz (from Izquierda Unida) is on record as saying ‘that we are seeing the worst aspect of politics and the worst moment in the history of the PP. It doesn’t put them in a good light as anytime-soon future governors of this country’, she added. From Electomanía, the latest poll puts the PP currently in third place behind the PSOE and Vox.

La Razón thinks that Pedro Sánchez will take advantage of the situation and call a snap election. We doubt it. The votes lost by the PP won’t be heading leftwards.

Ctxt thinks that voters of a certain party have no trouble at all with in-house corruption.

Casado didn’t fall for breaching the Constitution, with his blockade of the renewal of the CPJC. Neither was it for his efforts to sabotage the arrival of European funds to Spain, nor indeed for his improper master's degree. The president of the PP has been removed by his peers for breaking the omertá’. Editorial at elDiario.es here. It adds – in reference to his attack on Ayuso’s commissions: ‘Pablo Casado's courage in the fight against corruption - his commitment to cleanliness and regeneration - only lasted for one day. And then he chickened out’. Long story short, says the editorial, Casado was not leading the party forward, and since the Castilla y León issue, his time had run out.

Lastly, the comic explanation on YouTube with Miguel Charisteas here.

From El Plural here, the latest survey for Andalucía (February 16: before the Madrid shenanigans) shows the PP have fallen to third place, with Vox as the leading party there. Vox 24, PSOE 19 and PP 14. Madre Mía. Another reason we won’t see an early election there.

Almost half of Spaniards support a political barrier against Vox’ says Cadena Ser here.

A survey shows that the entry of the extreme right into the Government worries or generates fear for 59% of Spaniards, and 47.6% of those consulted believe that a cordon sanitaire should be imposed against the party in all public institutions. A similar number, 42% of the general population, believe that Vox should be treated as just another party…’.

Vox and its political manifesto are explained in an article titled ‘Vox and the dismantling of the Welfare State’ at Menéame here.

The PSOE leader for Castilla y León, Luis Tudanca, was dumbfounded when the PP candidate for the presidency Alfonso Fernández Mañueco stomped out of a meeting between the two leaders ‘after fifteen minutes’ following an apparent falling-out over the use of the word ‘corruption’. EuropaPress has the story here.

Los Genoveses ‘The unofficial page of the Partido Popular’. Many (hostile) political news clippings are stored here.

Europe:

Pedro Sánchez condemns Russia's actions in the conflict with Ukraine, after the Kremlin recognizes and sends troops to the pro-Russian republics of Donbas and Lugansk, and has promised joint action within the framework of NATO says El Periódico here.

From Schengen Visa Info here: ‘The EU’s tourism recovery to be impacted by the situation in the East as tensions mount in Ukraine’.

Those who collect the different designs on the two euro coin will be intrigued by a counterfeit coin found recently by the Guardia Civil. It shows the usual 2 euro design on the one side and a picture of the castle in Almansa (Albacete) on the other. No such coin was ever commissioned – saving this item from being just a common fake but also an eccentric piece of folk art. That, or maybe the Mafia made a mistake…

Media:

A gloomy article from Media-Tics here. Too many cyber-news sites (a study found 2,874 news-sites of all description based in Spain): not enough readers (or subscribers) and not enough advertising to go round. Here at BoT, there’s no advertising… (and not enough subscribers)!

The Corner takes a (manipulative) swipe at media manipulation over the Casado affair.

El País in English appears to have abandoned any news whatsoever about Spain.

Various:

From El Mundo here: ‘The Government approves the Animal Protection Law: which will bring an end to the sale of pets in stores, provide a course for those who wish to have a dog and hand down prison sentences for animal abuse. The first national law for the protection of animal rights will punish animal abuse resulting in death with up to 24 months in prison, and up to 18 months if the abuse requires veterinary attention’. The ley de Protección Animal will be signed into law later this year.

Two things leap out - one is the rule that we must be trained to have a dog. Many people already with dogs will be offended by this and, if the rules are stiff or tiresome, they may want to dispose of their pet.

Nº2 is of course – it will be against the law to dispose of a pet.

The Olive Press speaks of ‘online training courses for new dog owners’ and notes that among the new rules on the way, one will ‘no longer be allowed to eat one’s pet’ (!) Many people are understandably more concerned about the treatment of hunting dogs, which (in an ideal world) would work for two years and then retire for another six or so... So there’s another issue, since obviously no hunter is going to feed a retired dog for very long. In short, city dogs are one thing (do you have your plastic bag and doggy spray, Ethel?) and hunting and working dogs are something else. Frankly, I’d rather be a cat (although hoards of well-meaning matrons come out at night to feed and spay the feral cats).

The number of municipalities in Spain decreased by one this weekend as the citizens of Don Benito and Villanueva de la Serena (Badajoz) voted to merge into one municipality, with (by 2027) just one mayor. There’s a lot to be done. The two municipalities are quite large at a combined total of 63,000 inhabitants.

Why is Spain made up of autonomous communities? The question is answered in detail by Thomas Oliver at Eye on Spain here.

From Buzzfeed here: ‘I've lived in both Spain and the USA, and these are the 19 things the Spanish do wayyyy better’. Well, tapas, obviously… The writer says of the beaches here: ‘…Of course, parts of Spain are landlocked, but in this country that is even smaller than the state of Texas, you're never too far from the coast’.

Two nitwits (or possibly an amorous pair of nitwits) decided to break into the installation that surrounds the famous Geode in Pulpí (Almería) over New Year’s Eve and cause damage to the geode itself. They then posted their exploits on social media. The two have now been arrested says Nius Diario here.

Revealed: the most British cities in Spain. All Spanish cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants were considered for this ranking of the most British cities in Spain’. This (excruciating) piece comes from The Nomad Today. ‘The ranking, by Spain-Holiday, was drawn up using two main data points: the percentage of residents with British nationality, and the ratio of British pubs, shops and similar establishments per inhabitant’. Well, OK, Benidorm is first, followed by Orihuela, Benalmádena, Mijas, Torremolinos and Fuengirola…

From Eye on Spain here. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his relationship with Ronda.

Wonderland sounds jolly. elDiario.es says that the secret commune, led by women, is a fractured society in Catalonia of some 200 souls who regularly meet and connect over ayahuasca, marijuana and secret rituals including shamanism and worship of La Moraneta (the Virgin of Monstserrat). The group has been going for about thirty years apparently. The journalist has spent some time with them and has interviewed several members. "Plants are sacred to us, here we don't allow someone to spend the day smoking joints," says Estela during a conversation at her home. "Whoever does not understand the use we make of plants cannot be here with us".

Spain's ingenious water maze’. An item from BBC Travel here. ‘Invented by the region's Moorish rulers 1,200 years ago, Valencia's irrigation system is now a model for sustainable farming’.

Some early photos of La Sagrada Família in Barcelona at Rare Historical Photos here.

Our romantic trip to Lanjarón in 1987. My late wife wrote this one.

See Spain:

An expensive ride on the Al Andalus train around Andalucía, with the ABC here. Expensive? The cheapest tickets are at 3,325€ a pop. The Guardian goes the other way with: ‘Homage to Spain’s railways: take the slow train for the best scenic routes’.

The 15 most impressive secret and hidden towns in unimaginable places in Spain. We propose a tour of 15 towns in our geography that have a special charm for being built in inaccessible locations. Many were not part of the mass tourist routes for years and even today they remain almost secret destinations with numerous charms to reveal. Don't forget to visit them on your next getaway’ says Expansión here (with gallery).

Finally:

We have mentioned Morad (Wiki) before. He’s a young Spanish-Moroccan singer from the slums of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona) who isn’t thought much of by the record companies, yet – says Remezcla here – streams more songs on YouTube than even Rosalia. Here he performs El Coleta (a song about a friend in prison). Almost sixteen million views! His style of music is known as drill and he was recently interviewed by Jordi Évole here at LaSexta (with videos and full interview).

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