Persona Non Grata: Persona nonsensical

Can you name any well-known people who were declared persona non grata? If not, then let me offer you a few (well, three anyway): Kurt Waldheim (allegations of Nazi war crimes and so given persona non grata status in the US among other countries); Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain (the Italians booted her out in 1942 because she had sympathies with the Allies); Jörg Haider (the Israelis declared him non grata for fairly obvious reasons).

Persona non grata is used in diplomatic circles. The Vienna Convention says that a state may "at any time and without having to explain its decision" declare a member of diplomatic staff persona non grata, a declaration that usually leads to expulsion from a country. Persona non grata, by definition (diplomatic definition at any rate), has to apply to someone from another country. It cannot apply to someone from one's own country. Except in Spain, or specifically the Balearics, where it does.

When countries engage in a spot of non-grata-ing, there is usually a tit-for-tat response. You make our chap persona non grata, we'll make your chap persona non grata. So there. The Balearic Parliament has managed to introduce the same principle, substituting left and right for country X and country Y. Even by its pretty low standards, the parliament has plumbed even greater depths of stupidity by entering into a tit-for-tat non-grata-ing carry-on.

The background is of course oil, the subject which dare not speak its name with any modicum of measured debate, and the last place you will get any measured debate is the parliamentary playground. David Abril is the leader of the merged Iniciativa d'Esquerres (initiative of the lefts) and Els Verds de Mallorca (greens). This merged entity forms part of the Més per Mallorca coalition. Eco-socalism is an ideology to which David is partial and as such you would imagine - and you would be right - that he isn't overly keen on oil companies drilling ruddy great holes in the seabed near to the Balearics. As part of the parliamentary debate (if one can call it that) about oil exploration, David called for national energy minister José Manuel Soria to be declared persona non grata.

Having done so, the tit-for-tat started, the Partido Popular's spokesperson, Mabel Cabrer, calling for not one, not two, but three politicians from the left to also be declared persona non grata. They were, in descending order of importance, former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, former president of the Balearics, Francesc Antich, and ex-minister for the environment in the Balearics, Gabriel Vicens. Why was she picking on this triumvirate? Because it's all their fault, this oil malarkey. Nasty, horrid socialists that they are. Nothing to do with us in the PP or with nice Sr. Soria. And in fingering Vicens, Mabel struck a deep wound in David's eco-socialist heart, as Gabriel is of a similar bent and a member of the PSM Mallorcan socialists, one part of the Més fraternity.

What neither David nor Mabel was able to explain was quite how persona non grata status might work in practice, especially where Antich and Vicens are concerned. As they both live in Mallorca, would it be the intention to force them into exile to Benidorm or somewhere? But of course, silly me, persona non grata doesn't really mean what it normally means (at least I don't think it does). It is a yah-boo, sucks to you, we're going to ignore you type of persona non grata; a sending to Coventry persona non grata, always assuming that Coventry doesn't invoke the Vienna Convention.

In fact, the resort to the non-grata mechanism is pretty common; so common that it is utterly meaningless. Just as an example, President Bauzá and agriculture/environment/transport ministerial supremo Gabriel Company both copped for some non-grata-ing from the train platform in Mallorca's Llevant region last year. This wasn't an actual platform because there are no platforms and there are no trains, which was the whole point; a group (the platform) in favour of the train that will not run from Manacor to Artà wanted Bauzá and Company to be declared personas non gratas, which presumably meant that they would get a frosty reception were they to set foot in Son Servera, Sant Llorenç or Artà ever again.

The calls in parliament were, as with other similar demands for persona non grata, pretty puerile and they also obscured whatever sensible discussion there may have been on the oil business. But as we know, there is very little that is sensible, just name-calling and tit-for-tat posturing in what - the parliament - is supposed to be the islands' premier debating chamber. That it is not, and so lamentable is its attempts at debate that perhaps the whole lot of them should be declared persona non grata.

In A Dilemma: Zapatero

You know that Christmas is approaching when publishers start unleashing the annual rain forest that has been devoted to the celebrity biography or autobiography. In Britain, this means books being published some time in summer, as some time in summer is considered the official start of the Christmas season. In Spain, there is no Christmas season other than, oddly enough, just the Christmas period itself. But nevertheless, it can begin earlier than December, as in November. Even then though, it is late November. And this year, the Spanish celebrity book pre-Christmas rush will begin on 26 November. For it will be on this day that a long-awaited work hits the book shops. "El Dilema" (no translation needed), subtitled "los 600 días de vértigo vividos por el ex-presidente del gobierno", is that book. Its author is the ex-president (known by the British as prime minister for reasons that are far too dull to explain) who endured 600 days of a whirling sensation and a tendency to lose his balance. Ladies and gentlemen, I know you can't wait to go out and get your copy, it's José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's memoirs.

Personally and if I'm brutally honest, I think I would prefer Santa to bring me a copy of Andrew Strauss's memoirs so I can discover just how much Kevin Pietersen disliked him (though I fancy I would in any event have to wait until Pietersen subjects the world to his memoirs before discovering the full extent of their falling-out). But if the ex-premier (ex-president, as you wish) reveals himself in his ruminations to be Frank Zapa-tero, spilling all, going for the jugular, exposing the hot rats in the corridors of Madrid power, then we could be in for the mother of all invective.

Alas, I expect we will not. Apart from the fact that Spanish politicians either past or present rarely say anything of any note (and some rarely anything at all), Zapatero just isn't that sort of a guy. He is a regular guy, unlike another one upon whom it was thought he had modelled himself, going even so far as to acquire the same nickname - Bambi. An amiable white-tailed deer of a politician, he was certainly no Thumper, but it was amiability that was rather attractive. I confess that I liked Zapatero. Not in a Blair way, because that would be too stupid, but in a John Major way. He possessed the same quiet and undemonstrative ineffectualness, while, and unlike Major, didn't soil his name by having his underpants exposed to a titillated readership.

Zapatero's memoirs should really be titled "How I Became President (Premier) And Thought They Were Having A Laugh". No one, not even Zapatero, thought he was going to win in 2004, but then no one had factored in an Al-Qaeda faction blowing up trains in Madrid and the ruling PP making so much of a hash of things by blaming - wrongly and despite "El Mundo" still basically adhering to the notion - ETA for the atrocity and thus losing an unlosable election because the public knew that the PP was playing games. In many respects, Spain could have counted itself fortunate. Not for people being murdered by terrorists, but for the fact that Rajoy would otherwise have got in; it still beats me how he managed to hang on for as long as he did and won third time lucky in 2011.

In 2004 my interest in Spanish politics was far lower than it now is. So much so that I paid absolutely no attention to Zapatero and to the extent that, when I switched the TV on to see the moment when it became obvious that he had won, I saw for the first time the man who would be president (prime minister). I am not unique in having thought this I do understand, but there on the television was El Presidente Mister Bean. It was the very first thought that came to me. This white-tailed deer of a politico was rather endearing, having been also a white-bobbed rabbit caught in the headlights of media attention and looking totally bewildered in a Rowan Atkinson alter ego fashion when confronted by everyday obstacles such as knowing how to switch a light on. At least he didn't line up and wait for the King and put a finger through his flies. 

Yes, I liked Zapatero. A decent man, one whose legacy was that of social liberalisation. He deserves praise for that. He was caught on the horns of a dilemma brought about by crisis he had denied. But he was not dishonourable. Will I read "El Dilema"? That's the dilemma. Tedium in English is bad enough. In a different language it is very much worse. Santa, Strauss please.

The Long Hello And Goodbye

In the final week before the national election, no polls can be published; they might distort public opinion, or so the theory goes. Come the final 24 hours before the election, and everyone has to shut up and allow themselves a period of reflection before heading to the polls on Sunday to do the awful deed.

Putting a block on more polls is unnecessary; there hasn’t been a need for polls for months. PSOE’s long goodbye should go into the Guinness Book of Records for the most time it has been known that a political party would lose the next election. And badly.

Nothing has altered the path to the inevitable Partido Popular victory: not a Rubalcaba bounce when Zapatero confirmed that he knew the way the wind was blowing; not a surge of support from the right when PSOE carved up the constitution and committed the deficit requirement to law; not a wave of thanks to PSOE when ETA called it a day.

The eclipse of PSOE on Sunday will be the culmination of the process started by the credit crunch and Zapatero’s attempts to calm a nation’s fears. By saying there was no crisis, he was whistling in the dark; his delusion, a fiddling of inaction while capitalism burned. He responded too slowly, but he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. The game was up as soon as crisis raised its unlovely head. The story would have been the same had the PP been in government - and they know it.

Mariano Rajoy will be the next president of Spain, and president, by title and tradition going back to the nineteenth century, it is; calling him prime minister is in line with how titles normally work in a parliamentary monarchy. Rajoy’s ascendancy has been the long hello, so long in fact it is difficult to understand how he comes to still figure. Beaten by Zapatero in 2008, long dismissed as inadequate by many commentators and even members of his own party, one of them being the former PM José Maria Aznar, it is a mystery what he is doing about to take office.

Rajoy is becoming prime minister (president) by default. He has had to do nothing and say nothing. The prize has been his ever since the flames from Lehman and utterances regarding the previously unheard of subprime market first flickered across dealers' screens. Prime minister by default and prime minister by superior force and direction. Just as the Balearics Bauzá is a puppet on a long string stretching from PP central office, so Rajoy dances to the tune of his own master. And if Rubalcaba is to be believed, that is Aznar; Aznar who has been contemptuous of his successor and now treats him as the dummy to his ventriloquism.

The electoral slogan for Rajoy is both simple and simplistic. "Súmate al cambio". Join the change, more or less. When all else fails, and it normally does, politicians bring out the change word. It is the default slogan for a default prime minister; vote for me, I'm not the other lot. But what will Rajoy change? More pain and more austerity are not change; they are more pain and more austerity, and the electorate is heading to the polling stations to vote for masochism.

"Masoquismo" and "machismo". Macho politics with which to confront the unions and employment conditions. Mariano as Margaret, tackling the enemy within. Change is necessary, but at what cost socially (and industrially), as Thatcher stubbornly ignored. The unions, though, have been but one part of the collusive complacency of Spain's social capitalism model; they have been a loveably roguish pantomime villain to the Prince Charmings of successive governments of both blue and red who have flaunted the glass slippers of boom-time politics.

It was Zapatero's misfortune to be the shoemaker who couldn't repair the slipper. He can be accused of a lack of foresight, but foresight with hindsight is a wonderful thing; he danced to his own tune, as had previous Spanish leaders, one with an exciting boom-boom beat, but he ended up a busted flush and a boom-time rat.

Yet for all this, Zapatero helped to mould a Spain far more at ease with itself. The pain that Rajoy is about to inflict, and it is going to be painful, might just be acceptable, though by no means to all, but if he insists on a change that is a back to the future in terms of cultural, social and religious policies, he may not find the populace so willing to support him.

Come Sunday, the electorate of turkeys will vote for Christmas, and after Sunday, things will change. Just don't expect them to be very pleasant.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.