Back To A 1930s Future

The world of showbiz is inhabited by those who consider themselves well positioned to make pronouncements on matters far removed from the stage, the cinema or the rock-concert stadium. How many showbiz celebrities can you think of who have adhered to the corruption of the maxim of all the world being a stage and it being one from which they intend to pontificate, often repeatedly? Jane Fonda, Bono, George Clooney, the list is very much longer than these three alone.

Spain has its own celebrity activists. You may not have heard of them, but they are there nevertheless, and one of them is a leading actor called Willy Toledo. If Willy were British, his thoughts would be the target for ridicule by the "Telegraph" or "Daily Mail". Leftist loony, in other words.

Willy Toledo took part recently in an act of solidarity in the city of Gijón organised by something known as the platform against repression and for liberties. He fulminated against the actions of the current national government, one that, he claims, has converted Spain into a "pre-fascist country, if not already fascist".

The fascist narrative is overplayed in Spain. It is the consequence of historical memory in people's lifetimes, a narrative that is nuanced and moulded by this recent memory. It is one that the country cannot break out of. It lives in a fascistic past/present because the counter-narrative, that of a European, democratic, monarchical, free market but ideally egalitarian and clean society and politics, has struggled to consign it once and for all to the cesspit of history.

Toledo supports this fascist groove thing by styling the government as ultranationalist-Catholic, a descriptive picture of government that is suffused with dark colours on a Francoist canvas. It is more than a slight exaggeration. If Spain were either already fascist or pre-fascist, I think we might be more aware of the fact.

Toledo has also mused on the question of the monarchy. He is far from alone in wondering what will happen when the King dies or becomes too infirm to rule; the monarch's health is a subject to which an increasing amount of attention is being paid. Toledo is pretty clear in believing that the King's passing would mean the end of the monarchy. In continuing the historical narrative, he argues that the country should be preparing itself for the reinstatement of "that of which we were robbed", namely the Republic.

So there you have it. In Willy world, Spain is locked in a perpetual battle between a socialist-worker Republicanism and über-Nationalism, with the monarchy somewhere between the two, as, lest we forget, Franco was quite content for the monarchy to be sidelined.

Nevertheless, there are anxieties about the monarchy, and they come from elements of both left and right who have no desire to pursue a return to Republicanism and who are equally disquieted by an overtly nationalist agenda, one that embraces two competing forms of nationalism, one in a neo-Francoist fashion and the other, the nationalist separatism of the Catalans and the Basques. This is the broad centre of both politics and society which doesn't wish to keep re-living the 1930s and wants the European, democratic and, yes, monarchical model to prevail.

The trouble is that the 1930s won't go away. For all that Spain has achieved some sort of democratic modernity, the strains are evident. The position of the monarchy is just one, and it is a position that has deteriorated and may deteriorate further now that the previously dismissed could actually happen, namely Princess Cristina, the wife of the commoner Urdangarin and the King's daughter, being indicted on corruption allegations. Democracy doesn't demand monarchy, but in Spain, a virtuous and benign monarchy helps.

And then there is the economy. The journalist Javier González has made the point that Spain's unemployment is equivalent to the combined populations of its four largest cities - Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Sevilla. It is a point that is designed for effect, but the effect is striking, and it becomes even more so given the context in which González has written and for which newspaper he writes - "El Mundo". Right-wing, it, or González at any rate, invokes the same period of history as Toledo in further invoking the Great Depression and what came next in Europe. We are back to the same fascistic narrative.

One cannot and should not neglect the past. One learns from the past. But in Spain, there are some who want that past to reappear and others who have convinced themselves that it will reappear. This is a country stuck in the time warp of its collective memory. God help us.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Picnic At Hanging Rock: Balearics Day celebrations

Tuesday will be a public holiday in the Balearics. 1 March is Balearics Day. It commemorates the establishment of regional autonomy in the islands. In gestures symbolic of what many decry as a lack of urgency and a propensity for inertia in the Balearics, everywhere will be shut. Oh come on, be fair, there hasn't been a public holiday for a few weeks, and it's ages until Easter.

Official autonomy is 28 years old, 28 years of a degree of self-government which the Balearics enjoy, along with the other 16 regions of Spain and the African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. The autonomy of the regions has given Spain arguably the most decentralised system of government in Europe. It is one that was created as a buffer to both separatism and extreme-right centralism. This may have been the idealistic theory, but it hasn't stopped either of these competing objectives being pursued. The granting of autonomy may also have been a means of making democracy ever more local, but it hasn't stopped the democratic process being undermined by the prevalence of corruption, and not only in the Balearics.

A year older, but not a year wiser. On Balearics Day 2010, President Antich's address included an apology for the corruption that was abroad in the islands, predominantly in Mallorca. He had sought a remedy, that of removing his party's coalition partners, the Unió Mallorquina party, from government. A year on, what can he say now? The UM is in political exile from government, but it continues to be cast as the most rotten of the apples in the far from ripely sweet barrel of Mallorca's politics. The latest scandal to rock the UM, the operation monikered "Picnic" by the anti-corruption forces, sours the celebrations of the Balearics Day anniversary, turns them into a picnic at the hanging rock for discredited politicians.

Antich has no need to apologise this year for the actions of the UM. It's not his party. Perhaps he should apologise for the corruption of the body politic as a whole, but contrition should be unnecessary. He, as much as innocent citizens who try to lead honest existences in the face of endemic dishonesty, is as much a victim of a societal malaise that allows the virus of corruption to insinuate itself into every organ of the Mallorcan body.

The UM is the most visible source of scandal, and it is also the most visible of the political organisations that autonomy spawned. It was born out of the drive to regionalism, having been formed in 1982, a year before autonomy. Its benign nationalism, mixed with a centrist, pro-business philosophy, seemed well-conceived. It still is, but it has been undone by the party having been exposed as ultimately self-serving. Its belief that a change in logo could distance itself from court hearings involving party grandees has been revealed as idiotic. It now contemplates a name change as a way of making it appear whiter than the black of envelopes stashed with cash of the past: a rose thorn by any other name.

If the responsibility for correct behaviour that was meant to come with autonomy has been hard to deliver, the buffers to the polarities of separatism and centralism have begun to come under pressure. Catalonian ambitions for independence and a more assertive Catalanism have impelled the nationalist parties of the UM and the PSM (Mallorcan socialists), together with other parties to the left, towards a clearer separatist agenda. Against this, there is the greater Spanishness of the right, one of the Partido Popular and the UPyD (Unión Progreso y Democracia), while into the mix, from different ends of the spectrum, have emerged a more militant and radicalised Catalanism as well as a far-right, neo-fascist centralism.

28 years of autonomy, and the regional organisation of government is under great discussion and strain, and not just within the Balearics. The Zapatero government has raised doubts about regionalism, not on political grounds per se but because of the cost. The Partido Popular, through both its current leader Mariano Rajoy and his predecessor José María Aznar, have made it more of a specifically political and constitutional issue, Aznar having gone so far as to suggest that the current system of autonomy is not viable. He has railed against what he calls regions' pretensions to become "micro-states".

It is against the background, therefore, of democracy-weakening corruption, of the tensions of state versus separatism and of national parties' doubts that Balearics Day takes place. The regional government has expected 40,000 people to participate in celebratory events from Friday until 1 March, and no doubt they will have. But celebrating what exactly? The Balearics region is something of an artifice as it is. Pride, identity reside more within the individual islands rather than with the archipelago. Yet there was, in 1983, pride in and passion for autonomy, an expression of a new model of political self-determination that had been considered in the years before the Civil War but which didn't come to pass. Pride has subsequently been diminished by misbehaviour; passion supplanted by a rising radicalism.

28 years of autonomy, and the cracks are there. They are the fissures, the gorges of the eroding rock of regionalism over which the threesome of the celebrators, the corrupt and the politicians clamber. In the story and film of the hanging rock, three disappeared. On Balearics Day, you wonder what might disappear. Whither autonomy?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.