Showing posts sorted by relevance for query king. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query king. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, January 06, 2021

One King and Three more

It's a sort of Spanish Christmas Day today. Obviously Covid spoiled the usual parades and yesterday's buzz in the streets but the Three Kings were out and about delivering presents overnight and today the kids are on the TV news whooping over their booty. It's been good Christmas weather. Up North there have been the usual pictures of snowploughs doing their stuff, people leaving their houses by the upstairs window to slide down snowdrifts and shoppers using skis to get to the supermarket. In the Val d'Aran, the other day, the temperature was -28ºC. Here in Culebrón, for the Christmas period, it's usually been sunny by day and bitterly cold overnight. The water we put out for the cats was solid, solid ice this morning but I am glad to report that the extra insulation that we added to our water pipes seems to have done the trick and, so far, we've not woken up to frozen pipes and no water.

Today is also the day that the Pascua Militar is celebrated. I forget where we were, maybe visiting a Bronze Age Settlement or it could have been the cuco tour or even the one about the history of esparto production, but we got talking to this bloke. He was a bit of a conspiracy theorist. He told us that we should keep an eye on the Royals and the military. The Pascua Militar is a military ceremony that happens every 6th of January in the Royal Palace in Madrid. The King receives the President of the Government, the Minister of Defence, Minister of the Interior, the Chief of the Defence Staff, the Chiefs of Staff of the various branches of the military and lots of other martial types. It is true that only the other week, at the beginning of December, a bunch of over 400 ex military officers signed an open manifesto saying that the unity of Spain was in danger and complaining about commies in the coalition government, about the danger of the present government siding with the Catalans to break up Spain and lots more blah, blah blah of the sort that you'd expect from a bunch of moustache twirling, out of touch, dried up right wingers. It wasn't taken very seriously, at least publicly, but there were obviously echoes in that open letter of the tanks on the street in Valencia and the Guardia Civil bursting into parliament back in 1981 in an abortive attempt at a coup.

Back in 1981, on February 23, King, Juan Carlos I was relatively new to the job. He was a King that had been picked as Head of State by Franco, the old dictator, himself. The King was a member of the Borbón dynasty, he was married to Sofia from the House of Glücksburg (the Duke of Edinburgh's family) and he was titular head of the armed forces. On that long night he seemed to be on the side of the good guys. He went on TV to tell the army to stay in their barracks and the coup attempt fizzled out. That same King abdicated a few years ago and handed over to his firstborn, our current King, Felipe VI. The old King stepped down because he was getting old and infirm but also he'd become very unpopular, mainly because of parading one of his mistresses a bit too publicly but even more so for the pictures of them standing over an elephant that they had just slaughtered. He's now called the King Emeritus. In August he ran away amidst the scandal of a $100 million kick back from the Saudis and just recently he handed over 600,000€ to straighten out a bit of tax that he'd forgotten to pay. Oops a daisy! Reputation in tatters.

Now I don't care about Royalty. I've always lived in countries with royals; here, in the UK and even in Saudi Arabia. Royals seem to be a bit of an anachronism in the modern world but I don't get too worked up about them. When they all married their cousins they could at least claim the bloodline and some interesting genetic deformities but now that they all marry actors, journalists, handball players and nursery nurses they're just another sort of celebrity - like footballers and people who make sex tapes. I don't worry too much about the Kardashians, Beyoncé, Dua Lipa or C. Tangana either. Our King here seems like a nice enough bloke. His children seem well behaved and I liked the story about him stopping off for a set meal at some roadside restaurant but I hope that he's just another irrelevant rich person and that the conspiracy theory man wasn't right, especially given the date.

Monday, June 09, 2014

On Kings

I used to work with a chap who was fond of quoting Denis Diderot “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”. I worked with him over thirty years ago so it must have made an impact.

The truth is though that I'm not really bothered by what a bunch of rich toffs are up to. In fact I think it's funny that all the Royals seem quite keen to get married to non royals. At least when they were all marrying their cousins they could claim blue blood, or at least family genetic disorders. Now they're just more canon fodder for the paparazzi like any other celeb.

I must admit I always quite liked those fat ones - Andrew and Sarah. They were exactly what they should have been, a couple of Hoorah Henries going to parties or whatever it is that people with too much money and too much spare time do with their equally vacuous pals. They never tried too hard to pretend that they cared about dolphins or landmines.

An old friend said that he was surprised I hadn't blogged anything about the abdication of Juan Carlos I. Two reasons really. I've always tried to maintain the idea that this blog is about the things, the little things, that happen to me and around me in Spain and since the King stopped me giving blood he and I have not had a lot to do with each other. The second is that I don't care.

Juan Carlos has been a popular bloke. All the stuff around the transition, the way he handled himself then went down well. Also there were lots of urban myths about him helping stranded motorists, popping out to do ordinary things because he thought he was an ordinary sort of bloke. We all laughed when he told Hugo Chávez to shut up when he kept interrupting the then Spanish President in some meeting in Chile. We laughed again when we realised the ring tone on his phone was of one of the grandchildren laughing. Then a couple of years ago all sorts of stories started to pop up about his sexual dalliances particularly with a German princess, Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. (It's like some novelette isn't it?  - a German princess - does she have a hat with a spike?)  I think it was the elephant hunt that did for him though. From then on in his popularity plummeted and for the first time it was ok to have a go at the King. Just recently public opinion gave him 3.72 out of 10 against the 7.46 he scored in 1994.

Anyway. So why am I writing now. The answer is that I was shouting at the radio the other day.

The Spanish Constitution says, in article 14, that everyone is equal before the law. Later in articles 71 and 102 it gives some protections to parliamentary deputies, senators and members of the government to stop them being legally harassed. A later "organic" law dealing with the judiciary gave similar cover to various law officers. The King goes one better, he's above it all, he's untouchable. Those with protection still have to go to court but it takes a lot longer to get them there and they don't have to go along to the local courts. They generally go directly to the Supreme Court. The regional governments have done something similar for their regional deputies and  it's reckoned that there are now about 10,000 people with special judicial protection.

So, the King gives up his job and they are having to write a law to get his boy into place. When he goes lots of things change - like his daughters no longer being princesses - and he stops being above the law. A little side piece to this was that the abdication law should ensure that the present King maintains a special legal protection even when he becomes a regular citizen again. Some radio pundit was giving his very important opinion that it was imperative that this dispensation continue. "Why?" I shouted at the radio, "give me a reason!" Rich and powerful people get away with murder (hopefully not literally) anyway.

There are 1,700 officials being investigated in cases of corruption in Spain, 500 of them have been charged but only 20 people are in prison. The other day four bankers who had awarded themselves pensions of just short of 30 million euros didn't get sent to prison when they said sorry they'd been so bad and gave back the money. Rich gets have already got all the protection they need.

If the local court isn't any good then it should get fixed and if the local court is good enough for me it's good enough for him and for everyone else.


Sunday, August 16, 2015

Souls in danger

It was a  Bank Holiday weekend (of sorts). You could tell this because the day off, the Saturday, was overcast and cool. We went to Valencia or, to be precise, we stayed in Alfafar. We behaved as tourists should. We went on a boat ride on l'Albufera, the freshwater lagoon, with just a dash of salty sea water, surrounded by lots of rice paddies, to the south of Valencia city. We dutifully ate rice cooked in a paella for lunch. We even tried to find the beach.

I'd not booked a room until a couple of days ago so our late choice of hotels, so close to the coast, was a bit limited. I basically took what was left. As the electronic wizadry guided us past IKEA, past Media Markt and past the MN4 shopping centre it dawned that the hotel was in the middle of some gigantic retail zone. So instead of passing our evening wandering the streets of an ancient city centre we strolled the corridors and courtyards of a shopping mall. In fact we went to the flicks, Operación U.N.C.L.E. - passable enough.

No whisky to be had amongst the various food franchises around the shopping centre when we came out so we decided on the hotel bar. As we walked pat Burger King we realised that the tailback for the "drive thru" service was the cause of the traffic snarl up. Inside a queue to be served was so long that it was doubled back on itself. All the tables and chairs we could see through the big glass windows were full, the terrace was heaving with people, there was a lot of noise and everywhere was covered in that usual Burger King detritus of paper cups, torn sachets and crushed chips. The customers were old and young, gangs of friends, families and couples,  - it looked like a Burger King advert; it was so all embracing and so exuberant.

Food is a common and popular topic of conversation here. Spanish people after visiting the UK often comment sadly on British food. I have had conversations with Spaniards about how to tell good ham from poor ham just by looking at it.

But in that Burger King at 11pm I glimpsed the Spanish future. Just like us. Meals served from packets. The family meal, eaten together, gone. Individual food for each person at different times. Waiting for the microwave to ping. Offal served only to pets. Grandma's recipes forgotten. The kids have already started to have obesity problems.

"It's good living here," said Maggie, as we passed through the hotel lobby, "We can get one of those McMuffin things for breakfast". "I like the way they make the eggs the right shape so they fit".

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Autocrats, Republics and Monarchs

I'm sure that you remember that Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland had a bit of a problem with Oliver Cromwell. Charles was executed on a cold day in January 1649 and a Republic declared. Cromwell headed up the Republic as Lord Protector and, on his death in 1658, the title passed to his son, Richard. The army overthrew Richard in 1659 and invited Charles I's son to be King. It was all made official with Charles II's crowning in 1661. His first parliament ordered that Cromwell's body, and those of another couple of people responsible for the death of the old King, be dug up and hung. The heads were then stuck on a 6 metre long poles near Westminster Hall. Cromwell's head kicked around until 1960, when it was buried at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge

When the Hapsburg, Carlos II of Spain, died in 1700 he left no heir. The Bourbon family took over and they have kept Spain in monarchs ever since despite a couple of hiccoughs along the way. For instance Fernando VII had his reign interrupted when Napoleon put his brother on the Spanish throne in 1808 but that didn't last long. Fernando was back in 1813. Just one generation later, in 1868, Isabella II was deposed and a new monarch had to be found. Eventually the politicians asked a chap called Amadeo, from Savoy in Italy, to be King but he never took to Spain and abdicated after just five years. There was a very short lived Republic before the Bourbons were back in 1874 but that went pear shaped again when, in 1931, Alfonso XIII and his English wife abdicated in the face of The Second Republic, the one that Franco and his pals put paid to in the 1936 -1939 Spanish Civil War. Franco ruled Spain from the overthrow of the Republic till his death, in bed, in 1975. He named, as his successor, another Bourbon, the still alive Juan Carlos I, who abdicated in 2014 and who is just now running into a bit of a problem around his handling dodgy money during his reign. His boy Felipe is a Bourbon too and our present Head of State.

Funny thing there. Franco was buried inside the basilica in the rather impressive Valley of the Fallen. The new Socialist government is talking about exhuming his body so that it can be buried somewhere a little less showy. At least for the moment there is no talk of heads on sticks.

Now Maggie was sifting through Facebook and came across an article reprinted from the Observer of 1959. I was going to trim it down and pull out the salient points and try to tie that in to rulers of one hue and another. In the end I decided to leave it as it was for you to read or not. The article is impressive in how old it feels; I suppose 1959 is, really, long time ago but it still sounds like the recentish past to me. I particularly noted the idea of the radio and films as engines for social change, the idea of needing a labour permit to get a job in the city and the "bread and circuses" reference to football but you may pick up on something else from an article written at just about the half way point in Francoist rule of Spain.

The Observer piece said that this was an edited extract from an article by Nora Beloff entitled ‘What’s Happening in Spain?’, published in the Observer on 19 July 1959. Here's the text.

One of Spain’s principal attractions to it’s millions of visitors from industrial Northern Europe - besides sunshine and cheap services - is the archaism of the countryside.

You can drive for hundreds of miles and, apart from a patchy and uncertain tarmac under your tyres, there is nothing to remind you of the twentieth century: no poles or pylons, no petrol stations or electric pumps, just the peasants and their children in floppy hats and dateless clothes, women carrying pitchers on their heads and the two commonest landmarks, the donkey and the Cross. All this produces an illusion of permanence: so these people have always lived and so it seems they always will.

The illusion is false: and the tourists themselves are one of the reasons why. Their disturbing impact on old Spain was noted by the National Association of Fathers of Families, one of the major corporations now authorised in Spain, who said at it’s annual congress this year: ‘It is impossible to overlook the danger represented in certain regions of Spain by the tourist current as a vehicle of ideas and customs highly pernicious to our family morality...’

Primarily Spanish farming is being forced away from its primitivism by the reproduction rate of the Spaniards themselves. The population has increased by five million since the Civil War, and a European country with the lowest agricultural yield and the highest birth-rate is condemned to modernise or die. The switching of public investment from industry to agriculture, notable in irrigation, has, in fact, already been decided upon.

The change is being accelerated by the penetration into rural Spain of Western notions of progress. This comes partly from the tourists, but also from a plentiful provision of American films (very cheap and available in local currency under the American Aid Agreement) in village cinemas and from the spread of radio. But the decisive fact has been the migration of surplus labour into the cities, so that hardly any peasant family is without a cousin, brother or child to bring it into touch with the modern world. An old lady from a remote mountain village in the Asturias said she had had seventeen children, but added with a chuckle that her eldest daughter had married in the nearby town and had had only three;’They are cleverer these days...’

Crowding into cities is a common enough feature in the modern world but in Spain it has reached catastrophic proportions. Madrid (now two million) and Barcelona (one and a half million) are in a state of siege. Every day police patrol the platforms when the trains from the west and south arrive and peasants without labour permits are sent back on the next train at public expense. They find other ways of slipping back.

There are today 120.000 of these immigrants grouped in the outlying slums of Barcelona. Some we visited have built their homes on the beaches by the railway track, regardless of the stench, where the sewers tip their contents into the sea. You can see them with buckets trying to fish food out of the filth. Bureaucrats have visited the site, declared it insalubrious, and forbidden further building. So now when, as frequently happens, the waves knock down existing shacks, families have to move in together.

Leaving aside the sub-proletariat of the slums, who sell their services far below the minimum wage, labourers have suffered far less from inflation than white-collar workers and school teachers whose standard of life has sunk far below conditions before the Civil War. Many Spaniards will tell you that the Government is deliberately pursuing what an orange-dealer from Valencia called the ‘cretinisation’ of the Spanish people: demoting and starving the intellectuals (who are traditionally anti-militarist, anti-clerical and anti-Franco) and boosting the current football craze (which has now ousted bull-fighting in popular favour) by radio, television, liberal allocation of newsprint to sports papers, and the building of colossal stadia.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Does the King have it in for me?

The Spanish King is Juan Carlos I. I thought he semed like a decent enough chap but I'm beginning to have my doubts.

All laws passed in Spain are published as Royal Decrees. You may remember that, when I asked my bank why they had overcharged me, they replied that they couldn't tell me because Royal Decree such and such stopped them sending an answer without me first proving that I was, in fact, me.

I've been turned down a couple of times when I have tried to give blood beause I come from a country with Mad Cow disease. Feeling this was a little unjust I have written a couple of emails to people asking for a little more explanation. Nobody has ever repiled. But I heard about a group called the Spanish Federation of Blood Donors and I wrote to them. Their reply came back within 24 hours. It said "Unfortunately Royal Decree 1088/2005 of 16 September, establishes, for all Spain, an exclusion on donations from persons who resided within the UK for more than 12 months at any time in the period 1980-1996."

The King had a reputation, when he was a bit younger, for mixing with the common folk, giving lifts to hitch hikers on his motorbike, having a coffee in his local bar etc. The next time I bump into him I'm going to have a few words about the way he's picking on me.

Saturday, May 02, 2020

One Monday Morning

Today is May 2nd. It's an important date in Spanish, and Madrid history. It is the reason that the famous Goya painting at the left exists. Years ago I wrote this article for the old TIM magazine.
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The 2nd of May 1808. A Monday morning in Madrid. We've had French soldiers swaggering all over the city since March. I blame the old King, King Carlos IV, when he let that lackey of his, Godoy, do a deal with Napoleon to invade Portugal. Imagine that! Our troops fighting alongside all those Frenchy gabachos. Why would we side with that lot after the way they let us down at Trafalgar? Those cowardly Frenchy sailors ran away leaving our lads in the lurch and letting that one eyed, one armed Brit dwarf sink our navy. Lot of good it did the old boy anyway. Napoleon forced him to abdicate in favour of that son of his, Fernando VII, Now old Boney has both our Kings in France at Bayona planning to do goodness knows what with them.

This morning's rumour is that General Murat, Napoleon's brother in law no less, who seems to think that he owns this country, plans to send the last of our Royals up to Bayona. Our worthless puppet government, the Junta de Gobierno, said no but Murat won't take any notice of them. He'll do what he likes. I'm off to the Royal Palace for a bit of a look see. It's time we showed those gabachos that enough is enough.

And that's where it started. Our man, along with a bunch of other Madrileños, the people of Madrid, forced their way into the Palace. Murat had dealt with rioters before. He'd blown a demonstrating mob in Paris apart with canister shot but in Madrid the result was different. Instead of running home and hiding, as the Parisians had done, the Madrileños began to fight.

Murat was confident of his army. The men in Madrid were a part of the Grande Armée of France. The Great and Invincible French Army that had crushed everyone and everything in it's path for years. It included not only Frenchmen but soldiers gathered together from all over Europe, and beyond: Dutch cavalry, Hungarian Hussars, Polish horsemen and the fearsome, turban wearing, desert warriors, the Mamelukes. The finest army in the world against a rabble, ridden with lice, living in hovels and armed with knives and outdated shotguns. That rabble was angry though and in the narrow streets of Madrid hordes of them fell on those fine cavalry horses and their moustachioed riders, overwhelmed them and hacked them to pieces with their long country knives. Dragoons, who had survived the bloodiest battles in history, died in a rain of plant-pots hurled from balconies by housewives.

Spanish troops garrisoned in the city had been confined to barracks before the revolt because the French didn't quite trust them. Two captains, Luis Daoíz and Pedro Velarde, stationed at Monteleón Artillery Barracks, disobeyed orders, joined the insurrection and became national heroes. They organised a handful of soldiers and ordinary Madrileños who not only beat off the first French attack but took the commanding general prisoner. Murat was amazed and furious. He sent a larger force to overwhelm the Spanish defence. Both Spanish officers perished in the attack.

The French eventually regained control of the city. The best figures suggest that over four hundred Spaniards died, many of them before summary firing squads (The Goya painting), when the fighting was over. French losses were about 130.

On June15 Napoleon’s brother, Joseph, was proclaimed King of Spain, leading to a general anti-French revolt. In August, a British force under Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, landed on the Portuguese coast. By mid 1809, the French had abandoned Portugal. In Spain it took longer for the British and Spanish to defeat Napoleon's army and it wasn't till 1813 that the Battle of Vitoria finally saw the French driven from the Iberian peninsula.

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Playing Detective with Ted Rogers

You'll probably find this really boring and almost incomprehensible so don't feel you need to read on.

During the late 1970s and 1980s there was a quiz show in the UK called 3,2,1 hosted by Ted Rogers. The original format for the show was invented in Spain by a bloke called Chicho Ibáñez Serrador. The Spanish name was the other way around - Un, dos, tres or 1,2,3. It was hugely successful here partly because, at the time, there were only two Spanish TV channels and the one that didn't carry 1,2,3 was rather highbrow.

On the same TV channel, but some 36 years after the last Un, dos, tres was broadcast, we watch a Spanish TV programme called El Ministerio del Tiempo - The Time Ministry. The idea behind El Ministerio del Tiempo is that there is a covert government ministry whose job it is to ensure that Spanish history remains unchanged. They are able to do this because they have access to a system of tunnels which lead to specific dates and places in the past. One of the reasons the past may be in danger is that there are lots of tunnels and not all are controlled by the Ministry. An important part of the background to the programme is that Spain has always had people working for the state, funcionarios, functionaries. As the Ministry of Time has always existed those civil servants were recruited to work for the Ministry of Time in their own period but where they work, in time, is flexible. 

Still with me? So, this week, a woman called Caroline and her husband are on the game show 1,2,3 in 1981. They win the star prize of a flat at the seaside. Caroline isn't a happy woman though. Her husband abuses her and, to escape being beaten up by him, she locks herself in the bathroom. As he pounds on the door she looks for a place to hide and climbs into the airing cupboard which just happens to be one of these time doors; one not one in the care of the Ministry. She comes out of the tunnel just as King Felipe IV is passing by doing a spot of hunting. He takes her in as a part of his Court. One of the things Caroline does there is to introduce 1,2,3 as a sort of parlour game. The King takes a shine to her and they decide to marry. This would rather mess up Spanish history as Felipe should marry Maria Anna of Austria. Our 21st century Time Ministry team spring into action to keep things in order.

At one point in the story the King and Caroline leave a room and say "¿Nos alabamos?" It sounded like a farewell, TTFN, but, literally it means something like "Do we praise ourselves?" It was pretty obvious that it wasn't being used that way and, clearly, it had something to do with the game show - I presumed it was a catch phrase. I went a Googling and then asked a couple of chums for clarification.

The answer is that some of the regular characters in the 1,2,3 show were a comic trio, The Hurtado Sisters or las hermanas Hurtado. Whenever they were leaving the stage they would say "¿Nos alabamos? ¡Hala, vamos! ¡hala, vamos!, ¡hala, vamos!..."  The "hala vamos" means something like "wow, let's go" but the point is that in Spanish Bs and Vs sound the same. Equally Spanish Hs are silent. So, "Hala vamos" and "Alabamos" have exactly the same pronunciation. The catch phrase was a sort of humorous play on words. There is also a second significance for good Catholics because one of the responses that the congregation make during the mass is "Te alabamos Señor" or "We praise you Lord".

And that''s it. I told you you'd find it boring but I feel like a regular Hercule Poirot having found that out.

Monday, November 13, 2017

Now, where was I?

I wrote a couple of articles for the TIM magazine which were never published. This is one of them. It was called Spanish Government

The current form of government in Spain dates from the 1978 Constitution which was drafted three years after the death of General Franco.

Central government takes care of the “big things” like foreign affairs, external trade, defence, justice, law making, shipping and civil aviation but in many areas it shares responsibility with the regions - for instance in education and health care.

The National Parliament, las Cortes Generales, has two chambers. The lower house, equivalent to the UK Commons, is the Congress of Deputies and the upper house, something like the Lords, is the Senate. The lower house is the more important. It has 350 members, against the 650 in the House of Commons. The deputies are elected in the 50 Spanish provinces and also from the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Each province is an electoral constituency and the number of deputies it returns is population dependent. The big parties contest all the constituencies but there are also important regional parties which only field candidates in their home provinces. Voting uses a closed list system – if you vote for the party you vote for all their candidates. The number of seats is divvied up by a complicated proportional representation system. This means that there are several deputies for each province and no “constituency MPs”.

The number of senators changes slightly with population - each province elects four senators. The political parties put forward three candidates and voters choose up to three names - from the same party or from different parties. The four candidates with the greatest number of votes are elected. The legislative assembly, the regional government of each autonomous community, also designates one senator by right and a further senator for each million inhabitants. A different system is used in the Canary and Balearic Islands. Usually there are around 260 senators.

The official result of a general election is made public five days after the poll. Parliament meets and the deputies are sworn in. Next, the King, it's always been a King so far, meets with the heads of the parties and asks one of them to try to form a government. The government has to be agreed by the parliament as a whole. That's a simple enough process when one party has a clear majority or when a simple coalition will do the trick but the last couple of times, with no clear winner, the process has been very messy.

The leader of the party of government becomes the President of Spain with their official residence at the Moncloa Palace in Madrid. The President decides what vice presidents, ministries and ministers are required to run the country The people chosen form the Council of Ministers, akin to the British Cabinet

The Constitutional Court ensures that any new parliamentary laws are constitutional and comply with Spanish International agreements. The judiciary, overseen by the General Council of Judicial Power, is independent of government and has both national and regional structures

All of the 17 autonomous communities have their own president, government, administration and supreme court. The majority of funding for most of the regions comes from central government. The autonomous communities have differing devolved powers based on their history, on ancient law and local decisions. All of them administer education, health, social services, cultural and urban development. Several of the communities, like Valencia, have separate linguistic schemes.
Each of the 50 provinces, for instance Alicante, has its own administration, the diputación, that is responsible for a range of services.

The municipalities, the town halls, are headed up by a mayor supported by the councillors of the ruling party or coalition. Town halls are responsible for local services from tourism and environment through to urban planning and social services. The official population of the municipality, the padrón municipal, is the basis of the electoral roll and so the basis of this whole structure. Oh, except for the Monarch who gets his or her job simply by being born.


Friday, March 19, 2010

It made me giggle

The Zarzuela palace has confirmed that the King wears a hearing aid. Journalists began to suspect that he did when he was seen leaning close to hear someone speak at a public function.

The hoot though was in the last line of the news story. Telecinco (A commercial TV station) had film footage of King Juan Carlos coming out of a hearing aid shop!

Can you imagine the scene in Buckingham Palace? "Philip, I'm a little fatigued, might you go to the hearing aid shop and purchase a few spare batteries on my behalf?

Monday, October 09, 2006

The Day of the Valencian Community

9th October is a Fiesta in the Valencian Community.

It was the day, in 1238, when King Jaime I, a Christian King, rode into Valencia having driven the Moors out.

100 years later the town council thought it would be a good idea to have a party to celebrate the centenary of the victory. Somehow this one off party became an annual event marked (as are so many things in Spain) by setting off fireworks, especially rockets.

In the 18th Century, after the Spanish War of Succession, celebrating Jaime's victory was banned. As a bit of subversion the local bakers started to make sweets in the shape of the outlawed rockets. The Valencians somehow associated the rocket shaped sweets with male genitalia and, as a bit of an afterthought , they started to make other sweets from marzipan in the shape of the fruits that grow in the province (more fecundity!). A bit of free association and the day became associated with lovers.

It became the tradition for men to give the little marzipan sweets, wrapped in the hanky, to their womenfolk: a local St Valentine's day if you will.

I understood that the sweets and hankies were available in all the cake shops throughout Valencia but in our bit of Valencia, in Pinoso, all the cake shops were shut fast. So my modest attempt at a little romance came to naught.

There was some dancing going on outside the Town Hall though.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Suspended in time between pole and tropic

I just popped into the opticians; some sort of strange feeling in one eye. The optician tells me its a bit of physical damage that should clear up. The optician says she's heard that I give English classes. Pinoso can be a very small place.

The other day I was told that someone was going to ask me for classes. In turn I enquired about the person who had asked about me. From just a first name my born and bred Pinosero informant was able to tell me who it was, who the family were etc. As I said, it's a very small place.

On Sunday we had Villazgo, the local event to celebrate the granting of a town charter to Pinoso back in 1826. Maggie and I saw the original document, signed by the King Ferdinand VII, when we did a little tour of the town archive. Fernando VII is often labelled the worst king that Spain has ever suffered. As we walked from the parked car to the main stage for the event we bumped into someone we knew. Maggie knows tens of people through her work at the estate agent. We said hello, we chatted, we said goodbye and five metres later we bumped into someone else. And so it went. Several encounters later I left Maggie, to be nice to people, whilst I headed for the stage. Even as my surly self I found myself exchanging words with three more people on the way to the, now half completed, opening ceremony. As I half listened to the speechifying I chatted to a neighbour from the village. I didn't know the person who was giving the speech but the neighbour did. A couple of people amongst the great and the good on the stage nodded at me. Apart from Maggie's celebrity we've been here a long time; both of us work in town, pointing my camera at most of the things that move in Pinoso also gives me a certain notoriety and, because we're Britons, our presence is more noted at some of the events we go to. As we wandered the Villazgo stalls and stands we spent much more time talking in English than Spanish but we probably spoke to nearly as many Spaniards as Britons. A couple of the British conversations somehow turned to questions about snippets of Spanish history. History which I knew.

On Mondays I work both the morning and the afternoon at the local language school. It doesn't really make sense to go home for lunch. For the past few weeks I've gone to the same bar but sheer happen stance meant I was short of time today so I went to a different, nearer place. Not a bar I use regularly. In fact the last time I was in there was last August! The bar didn't advertise sandwiches nor did they advertise the pop-like beer I often drink. I ordered as I shed my coat and faffed with my backpack. Then I set down to read a bit of Eliot (I just had to slip that in, I don't read a lot of poetry but for one reason or another I'd decided to revisit the Four Quartets which I last read, in its entirety, as I travelled to and from my first youth work job in Leeds in the late 1970s). When it came to coffee time I asked for an Americano, the woman repeated the word with a quizzical look, so I changed my order to the older, more Spanish name, for a watered down espresso.

One of the conversations I had today was with someone, a British couple, who are a bit fed up with Pinoso. They find the place a bit humdrum, a bit limited in its horizons, a bit short of decent food, half closed half the time and all closed the rest. It made me realise that I'm not. That I quite like the food, that I like that I know a few names in the town, that I can cobble together enough Spanish to have a conversation of sorts, that I know what's going on both locally, historically and nationally and that, despite my natural reserve and my well cultivated surliness, I'm pretty much at home here.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Maggie's take

I just told Maggie the story about the King and the hearing aid shop. She wondered if the shop assistant would take the call from her mother and leave the King waiting just like they do every other customer.

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Valencian Community Day

We live in the province of Alicante. Along with Castellon and Valencia these three provinces make up the Valencian Community.

Back in 1238, on October 9th, King Jaume I to give him his Valencian name or Jaime I in Spanish successfully took Valencia City as part of the Christian reconquest of Spain. The Moorish invaders weren't actually cleared from all of Valencia till 1305 and the last bits of what is now geographically Valencia weren't added until 1851. Nonetheless, when the powers that be were looking for a day to celebrate being Valencian they settled on October 9th.

In the days when public holidays used to take us by surprise our pal Pepa, who is a born and bred Valencian, told us that on this day the tradition is to give little marzipan sweets wrapped in a silk handkerchief. Wikipedia tells me that this is because October 9th is also San Dionisio's day who is the patron saint of lovers (odd, I thought Valentine had that job sewn up). I remember going in to Pinoso back in 2005 to search out the sweets to hand over to Maggie. All I found were locked and bolted cake shops. Apparently San Dionisio doesn't have much sway in Alicante. His patch is Valencia province so there is no confectionery to be had in Alicante.

I work in Murcia so it wasn't a day off for me today, Murcia day is June 9th. But I did pop into Pinoso to have a look at this morning's events. Basically there was a dance troupe "Monte de la Sal", the opening of a revamped play area named for the recently deceased first president of the current democracy Adolfo Suarez and a play for children called something like "Looking for King Jaume."

It was nice if not exciting. I walked up from the town centre to the new play area following the dance troupe and their escort of giants and bigheads as well as the great and the good of the town. A couple of people said hello to me and all around me people were greeting neighbours and pals. There was even a lot of that high fiving amongst younger people. Pinoso certainly doesn't seem to have much of a problem with community with or without a day to mark it.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

The Battle of Almansa

The Battle of Almansa was an important battle during the War of the Spanish Succession. It was fought on 25th April 1707. Almansa is about 50 minutes from Culebrón.

The commentator was really positive. "Just look at that rainbow, how beautiful, one of the best I've ever seen!" True enough. Mind you he was in a nice cosy and dry caravan whilst we were suddenly in fear of drowning to death sitting in the stands. We found the beauty of the rainbow hard to appreciate.

When the Spanish Habsburg King Carlos II died in 1700 he left no direct heir. There were two rival claims to the throne - the Hapsburgs, through the Archduke of Austria and the Bourbons, through the French King. We British backed the Austrian claim but several European powers weighed in behind one side or the other. Between 1701 and 1714 battles raged all over Europe and in North America and there were even some skirmishes in the Caribbean.

At the Battle of Almansa, just outside Almansa in Castilla la Mancha, the Duke of Berwick, the illegitimate son of James II of England serving in the French Army, beat the French Henri de Massue, leading British troops. Odd eh?

In the end the British were on the losing side but the Treaty of Utrecht signed near the end of the war handed Gibraltar over to the British. We're still there.

According to that same commentator the participants in this re-enactment, still something relatively unusual in Spain, had come from several European countries just as in the real battle. The Russians and Ukranians had apparently driven all the way. The Irish had brought their horses. Shame it rained quite so much.
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Sunday, August 23, 2009

He loved Big Brother

I signed up for the Spanish eBay today and I had a bit of a struggle entering my NIE - the 9 character code that identifies we resident foreigners - it annoyed me a lot.

Everyone in Spain has to carry ID. The most usual way for Spanish nationals to do this is to carry their DNI, an identity card.

Youngsters don't have to hold a card until they are over 14 but it is usual to apply for a DNI for a child as soon as their birth is registered. If a family decides not to apply for a DNI for their child "at birth" then the details of the minor have to be entered in the "family book." Foreigners have to carry ID too, usually a passport.

Foreigners who are resident in Spain have to apply for an ID number as does anyone who wishes to carry out any financial transactions here whether they are resident or not.

The identity "number" for Spanish Nationals, the DNI, has 8 figures and just one control letter whilst the one for foreigners, the NIE, has a letter at both the beginning and the end with seven numbers in the middle. Spaniards are always surprised, nay shocked, to find that UK passport numbers change from issue to issue. Their Spanish ID numbers follow them through life appearing on passports, driving licences etc.

The Spanish ID card carries simple details like a photo, name, date of birth, place of birth, address, names of parents etc. Until recently it also carried a finger print but the newest cards carry the characteristics of that print in electronic form on a chip and also provide a digital signature for electronic transactions. So every Spaniard is fingerprinted - something currently reserved for criminals or suspected criminals (oh and motorists) in the UK.

Everyone, but everyone, thinks they have the right to see your ID. I needed it for eBay, I needed it to register my mobile phone, to sign on the dole, to rent a flat, to register in a hotel, to hire a car, to get a credit card, to pay by credit card, to open a bank account, to register for health care, to get gas bottles and even to join a classic car club.

You don't need to know you account number at the bank or your social security number at the tax office so long as you have your DNI/NIE. Everything, but everything, is connected to your ID number. Lots of official Spanish databases are linked and I suspect that it would be very easy for someone to access lots and lots of information about anyone living in Spain.

The Spanish ID card was introduced by Franco, a dictator. He got card number 1 and he left the numbers up to 100 for his family and for the Royals. Our King has number 10.

Monday, December 31, 2007

El Escorial

Philip II was the Spanish King who had a bit of a tussle with Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth I.

Philip built a few ships to invade England in 1588 but whilst they were waiting to pick up an army from Holland a bit of a problem with the English fleet, the reputation of a certain Francis Drake and most particularly a spot of bad weather rather put paid to his invasion plan.

His home palace was this place, El Escorial. Quite a pile of stone. Bit austere. We were there yesterday.

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

For the want of a nail

Last century, when Windows 98 was cutting-edge technology and when mobiles were big and analogue, I was in Mexico. I'd gone into a locutorio, a place to rent a computer with an internet connection for a few minutes. The Mexican keyboard layout was quite different to the British keyboard I was used to. The QWERTY letters were as they should be but the symbols were in different places. What's more the keyboard had done a fair few miles and lots of the keys were as highly polished as as the stairs of the spiral staircase in a medieval castle. I needed the @ symbol for an email address and I had to resort to Ctrl C and Ctrl V, cut and paste.

I was reminded of this the other day when I had to use a computer with a British keyboard layout - I spent ages staring at the strange layout when I wanted a / or a #, but the final nudge to write this blog came when the passport office refused to accept my address as being Caserío Culebrón. They didn't like the tilde, the accent over the i and o. Nowadays, living in Spain, I'd never consider buying a computer with a British keyboard layout for all the faffing about trying to put tildes and Ñ into words by resorting to tricky keystroke sequences. 

Spanish needs the tildes to show where the stress in a word goes and, sometimes, just to mark the difference between two words that are spelled the same way but have different meanings - tú for you and tu for your for instance. Or cártel for the drugs organization and cartel for a poster. If English used tildes, we'd be able to tell whether "I read the Times" is something we do habitually, present tense, or something we did yesterday, past tense.

When I first started to learn Spanish, the Spanish alphabet had 29 letters - 26 were shared with we British but CH, LL, and Ñ were three extra - 29 in all. By the way I'm just using capitals to make the combinations stand out more. The decision to remove them the CH and LL was taken in 1994 but some websites say that the letters weren't finally retired till 2010. Even with the CH and LL gone that still left 26 letters because of the ñ/Ñ.

Changing LL and CH didn't cause much fuss. They're just two letters together. Nothing really changed except for the way some words were presented in dictionaries and indexing systems. The Ñ is different. If it had been removed from the dictionary, then something like 15,000 words would have had to be spelled differently and the Spaniards (and other Castilian speakers) were dead against that. I'm sure you know the sound maybe because of the very famous Spanish word, mañana, or because of the name of the country, España.

The Ñ didn't appear in the official Spanish dictionary till 1803, but its history, as an independent, and particularly Spanish letter, goes back well over 1,000 years. Latin doesn't have the sound that the Ñ represents so there is no Latin letter like the Ñ. As memories of the Roman Empire faded in memory and as Romance languages like French, Italian and Castilian Spanish developed, so did a guttural, stressed, N sound. A way of writing the sound down had to be found. The French and the Italians eventually chose GN, the Catalans chose NY, and the Portuguese chose NH. At the time I'm talking about the only people who really wrote things were monks. They were responsible for copying and translating texts as these changes were going on. We know that, in Spanish, the Ñ triumphed, but for a long time, there was no standardization, and two or three ways were used to record this sound, sometimes in the same document. One method was to use a double N. The monks weren't just copying things out with a cheap biro - they were carefully crafting each letter on expensive parchment. The double N used both space and time. The monks found a simple solution, they put a little mark over the N to show that the sound should be read as the guttural N.

In the 13th Century, Alfonso X or Alfonso the Wise, the scholar king who is intimately linked to the reconquest of Murcia by Christians, ruled that the Ñ should be used to represent the guttural N sound. And when Antonio de Nebrija published his first grammar of Castilian in 1492, he too included this letter in his alphabet. The same Ñ is used in a couple of other local languages on the Spanish peninsula, in Galician and Asturian, and it was also used when lots of aboriginal South American languages, such as Quechua and Zapoteco, were first written down. We do exactly the same when we're faced with a name written in Arabic or Japanese script and reproduce it using the 26 letters we have at our disposal.

Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the World. Next up, as mother tongue; it's probably Castilian Spanish. More people speak English than Spanish, but for a lot of those people, it's not their first but a second language. Despite this, in the digital age, there was a real threat to the survival of the Ñ. In 1991, the forerunner of the European Union wanted to standardise computer type keyboards, and, because of the dominance of English in the digital world, the suggestion was for the inclusion of just the 26 "English" letters. The Spanish Government was having none of it though. When the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1993, the Ñ was enshrined and protected in this bedrock EU document as a cultural heritage.

It's an important letter. There are lots of Spanish words that change meaning completely if the N is changed for an Ñ. A favourite is año for year and ano for anus - one to bear in mind at Christmas card writing time. Cono for cone is not the same as coño which can be a quite strong word to describe an essential part of female anatomy as well as a good all round sort of curse word. There are lots of less exciting examples like cuña, wedge and cuna for cot/crib or mono for monkey and moño for a hair type bun. It goes on.

I wonder what the passport office would have done if I were a British citizen called Muñoz, Peña, or Zuñiga, all of which are pretty common Spanish surnames - ridden roughshod over my identity I suppose and changed my name. After all Michael Portillo pronounces his name in an English not Spanish way despite its origin.

Friday, March 11, 2022

Personal bias

Watching the TV news in Spain on Thursday afternoon. Thinking about the untrammelled stupidity of it all. About the actions of men, and it always seems to be men, like Putin and Sergey Lavrov sending people to kill and be killed. Wondering who is making money from this because behind almost every indecent act someone is making money.

Back at the news the next item was that the Partido Popular (PP) in Castilla y León had done a deal with VOX to form the regional government. It's not on the same scale but it is on the same spectrum of human wickedness. It's the first time that VOX has actually been in a coalition government. It's the first time since the restoration of democracy in Spain, in the period after Franco died, that the far right has actually been in government. It may be the first but it probably won't be the last.

I'm not sure how genned up on Spanish politics you are. I try to keep up but sometimes I despair because, every now and then, there is some event that those in the know know and I don't. Well at least I didn't till I did. There's just been a palace coup in the PP for instance and, until the moment it happened, I thought that everyone in that party loved their leader. Apparently not. All the journalists told me, after it had happened, that it had been on the cards for ages and that everyone had seen it coming. Not me.

Anyway. The basic plot of Spanish politics is easy. There's a traditional left wing and a traditional right wing party, a growing far right party, a fading far left party plus a crumbling centre. Oh, and lots of regional parties.

On the left there's the long established PSOE, Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the Spanish Labour party if you will. They're not that left really but they remember to talk about poor people every now and again. They don't forget Bill Clinton's campaign message "It's the economy, stupid" so they try not to upset the people with the real power too much or too often. Their problem is that they don't have a parliamentary majority. They are propped up by a coalition with Podemos. Podemos are to the left of the PSOE. Podemos are not that keen on kowtowing to the money men so they give their coalition partners a lot of gyp. Even with Podemos the PSOE still don't have a clear majority and they have to prop up each crucial vote with a rag tag collection of parties.

Podemos, as I've said before is further to the left than the the PSOE. For some people there is an equivalence between the nutcase left (Podemos) and the nutcase right (VOX). Podemos, formed in 2014, was born from a popular political uprising that said it didn't trust politicians at all. As soon as they got a few people elected though they stopped talking about radical alternatives and elected a party hierarchy just like everyone else. They also subsumed the remnants of the communist party. As everyone else clamours to show how pro Ukrainian they are this bunch got into bother for saying that sending weapons, going to war, wasn't a good thing. Podemos is losing voter support all the time. The PSOE and Podemos keep having little fallings out because, from time to time, Podemos stands up for something it believes in - like a decent minimum wage or rent controls - whilst the PSOE think this will alienate their more right leaning members and it wants to pick up the remnants of the next bunch, Ciudadanos.

Ciudadanos is a party in the centre. They started well, back in about 2006, but it's all gone wrong and basically, they're a spent force. They had a bit of a power struggle in their ranks a few years ago which did for them as they forgot to stay central. Instead of continuing to broker this concession from the right and that concession from the left they drifted right. Now nobody remembers why they voted for Ciudadanos instead of just continuing to vote PP.

The PP, the Partido Popular. The sensible right, the Conservative Party. They are a post Franco party with roots in a bunch called Alianza Popular but the PP, as such, was born in 1989. Like the PSOE this lot have been in power a couple of times. They're just in the middle of a meltdown at the moment. Their young (ish) leader had a dust-up with a young (ish) woman who heads up the Regional Government in Madrid. Isabel Diaz Ayuso, the Madrid president, is dead popular for doing that Boris thing, the Donald thing, of saying whatever comes into her head. The idea is to make real people think she's a real person too and not a scheming politician. As a result of that internal dispute the leader of the PP is in the throes of resigning and he's about to be replaced by a steady hand on the tiller politician from Galicia. Nothing is decided yet but if it doesn't happen, if he's not the next leader of the PP, then the drinks are on me.

Then there's VOX. They're a bunch of racist, misogynist, radical right wingers who came into being in 2013. They couch their hatred in dodgy logic. They don't say they think black people are worse than white people but they do complain about immigration, not immigration per se, illegal immigration. Those are the people who clamber over border fences and cross the Med in toy boats. You know what colour illegal immigrants are don't you? Or they say they don't think it's fair to centre on the violence against women, after all women menace men too, so what we should centre on is violence in general. VOX are gaining in popularity. This means that the PP is careful not to stray into territory where they may appear to be too liberal so as not to lose the most right wing of their supporters to VOX.

Then there are lots of regional parties. Some are there on a single issue - fair deals for rural areas is big at the moment for instance - but most are well established regional parties particularly from Cataluña or The Basque Country. There are left and right leaning parties in amongst the small parties, there are parties who want independence for their region and groups that have historic links to terrorism. If you're British just think SNP or Plaid Cymru or Sinn Fein with a bit of Caroline Lucas or George Galloway thrown in.

So we've got the political spectrum which goes from issue parties through regional parties on to left, right and centre parties.

The structure is straightforward too. At local level there are the town halls. Spain still very much votes for personalities rather than parties at the municipal level.

Next up is the Regional Parliament - Valencian Community, Andalucia, Basque Country, Cantabria and so on. The Regions are very important in Spanish politics. It's they who take care of the services that affect people all the time, like health and education. The presidents of the regions are often referred to as Barons (most of them, obviously, are still men with grey suits) because just like the bunch that made King John sign the Magna Carta they have a lot of political clout at all levels.

Finally the National Parliament, the Congreso de los Diputados. This is the one that meets in Madrid. Just like in the UK it has two "houses". The difference from the UK is that both the upper and lower houses are elected. The deputies, just like British MPs, but elected in a completely different way via a party led system of proportional representation, are the rank and file, everyday politicians who do as their party leaders tell them. The upper house, the Senate, like the Lords, is used to park politicians and to reward loyal service. There are actually some real politicians in the Senate too who do their bit in keeping the country running.

Perhaps I should have heeded the advice to never talk about politics or religion!


Thursday, April 17, 2008

Bit lively

I've been doing a lot laughing, shouting and snorting at the radio and TV this last week or so.

After winning the General Election the Socialists had a bit more procedural bother than usual getting both the Speaker and the President in place. They seemed to ride it out with a few merry quips.

The Opposition leader has been having his problems as well. The President of the Madrid area, who looks well hard to me, keeps saying she won't be running against him for the leadership of the party at the next conference. He must be very relieved to hear that!

In the last couple of days we've had the new Government Ministers appointed. The chap from Pinoso stayed on as Finance Minister but there were a lot of women new to post including the Housing Minister - the first minister since the restoration of democracy not to have been born under Franco's dictatorship. The picture I liked best of all was the new, pregnant, Defence Minister, Carme Chacón, stepping out to review the troops for the first time, she was dressed in Mothercare.

Last week I was lost for about an hour looking for a furniture factory in the nearby town of Santomera. The day before yesterday a man there cut his mum's head off and strolled around town with it wrapped up in a bloody rag."Now she'll shut up" he said.

It's difficult to avoid football in Spain. Getafe, a Madrid team, were in the quarter finals of the UEFA cup playing Bayern Munich. Square after the first leg Getafe were beaten in the cruellest of ways in the dying moments of the second leg. A collective sigh of shared pain could be heard throughout the nation. A story in El Pais about Getafe fans turning up in droves to the teams training session next morning to applaud thir defeated heroes struck a note with me.

Today Getafe were back in action against Valencia in the Spanish equivalent of the F.A. Cup. On his way home from the State Opening of Parliament the King was asked who he reckoned for the game "Those who lost will win" he said. Another Getafe fan. They lost, 3-1.

Franco used to do the football pools you know. Somehow it's hard to imagine Hitler, Mussolini or Pinochet doing the same.

Monday, February 22, 2021

Democracy counts

The current Spanish Government is a coalition between a slightly left of centre political party, the PSOE, and a much smaller and much further left party, Unidas Podemos. The other week the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, a Government Vice President, said, a couple of times, that the democracy in Spain was flawed. As you may imagine this caused a bit of a fuss. Then, a couple of days later, a talentless rap artist was sent to jail for suggesting in his songs that terrorists were jolly nice and our King was jolly nasty. People protesting the incarceration took to the streets and did a bit of burning and looting whilst they were there. Podemos was mealy mouthed in its condemnation of the street violence. 

My own opinion is that Spain has a bit of a problem with some aspects of democracy. For instance a woman, who tweeted some old jokes about about ETA, the Basque terrorists, blowing up the admiral Carrero Blanco in 1973, was sentenced to a year in prison (time that she would never have served) though her sentence was quashed by a higher court. Similarly 14 musicians in Spain have been taken to court, presumably for the content of their songs, though, in the end, only two were locked up.  Generally though it's a good place to live with all of the safeguards you would expect from a solid democracy even if there is a tendency to set those safeguards to the side every now and again and to be heavy handed and over authoritarian. There are far too many examples of the limitations on basic democratic expectations, like access to information, being able to complain or expressing an alternative opinion without coming up against insuperable obstacles or facing either a hefty fine or a jail sentence. Then again I remember that the UK locked up a couple of rappers for singing a song.

Freedom House, a US organization that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights begins its country profile for Spain with this summary paragraph: Spain’s parliamentary system features competitive multiparty elections and peaceful transfers of power between rival parties. The rule of law prevails, and civil liberties are generally respected. Although political corruption remains a concern, high-ranking politicians and other powerful figures have been successfully prosecuted. Restrictive legislation adopted in recent years poses a threat to otherwise robust freedoms of expression and assembly. A persistent separatist movement in Catalonia represents the leading challenge to the country’s constitutional system and territorial integrity.That sounds about right to me.

On Sunday morning I heard a piece on the radio based on the Economist Magazine's Democracy Index. I'd never heard of the Democracy Index but, apparently the UK magazine has been producing it since 2006. It quantifies the amount of democracy in 165 states. Not surprisingly their general, worldwide, conclusion is that the implementation of government imposed pandemic control measures led to a huge rollback of civil liberties in 2020. 

The Democracy Index score is based on five categories: 

  • Electoral process and pluralism 
  • The functioning of government 
  • Political participation 
  • Political culture
  • Civil liberties 

There are a range of indicators within each of these categories and each indicator is scored. The questions are of this type: Are elections for the national legislature and head of government free?, Is the functioning of government open and transparent, with sufficient public access to information?, To what degree is the judiciary independent of government influence? 

From the score given to each country they are placed in one of four types of regime and ranked: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime or authoritarian regime. Although the score is plotted on a ten point scale it is presented in decimal format, 7.65 for instance, so it's actually more like a thousand point scale. Countries that score 8 and 9 are classed as full democracies, those with 6 and 7 as flawed democracies, hybrid regimes generally score 4 and 5 and authoritarian regimes score in the 1,2 and part of the 3 scale. 

The least democratic country on the scale for 2020 is North Korea with a score of 1.08. The most democratic country is Norway with a score of 9.81. Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand and Canada are right up there too. Surprisingly, in Western Europe, countries like Belgium, Italy, Greece and Cyprus are classed as flawed democracies because they score below 8 and, this time around, France slipped to that level. The best of Eastern Europe countries, Estonia, comes in as a flawed democracy as does the United States which is at position 25 with a score of 7.92. Just for a couple of my regular readers Russia is at 124, Qatar at 126 and Oman at position 136. Australia shares 9th position. In all the cases that's out of 167.

Spain does alright with a score of 8.12 and 22nd position. It's the lowest scoring full democracy in the table; teetering on the edge. The UK does better; full democracy with a score of 8.54 and position number 16. Ireland is better still, 9.05 and 8th place. 

So the Economist almost agrees with Pablo.