Lavengro in Spain

Spanish election results

Counted 100%
Total seats 350
Votes counted: 24,590,557 - 71.69 %
Abstentions: 9,710,775 - 28.31 %
Invalid votes: 31,7886 - 1.29 %
Blank votes: 33,3095 - 1.37 %

PARTY / SEATS / VOTES / %

PP / 186 / 10,830,693 / 44.62%
PSOE / 110 / 6,973,880 / 28.73%
CiU / 16 / 101,4263 / 4.17%
IU / 11 / 168,0810 / 6.92%
AMAIUR / 7 / 33,3628 / 1.37%
UPyD / 5 / 114,0242 / 4.69%
PNV / 5 / 32,3517 / 1.33%
ERC / 3 / 25,6393 / 1.05%
BNG / 2 / 18,3279 / 0.75%
CC/NC/PNC / 2 / 143,550    0.59%
COMPROMÍS-Q / 1 / 125,150 / 0.51%
FAC / 1 / 99173 / 0.4%

PP - Conservative
PSOE - Social Democrat
CiU - Centre Right Catalan Nationalists
IU - Left Socialists
AMAIUR - Very dodgy Basque Nationalists (left), coalition including Bildu (Sinn Féin equivalent). Able to stand now that ETA says it has stopped murdering people.
UPyD - New Centrist party
PNV - Not quite so dodgy Basque Nationalists (Christian Democrat)
ERC - Left Catalan Republicans
BNG - Left Galician Nationalists
CC etc. - Canarians
Compromís-Q - Valencian Left Ecologists
FAC - Asturian party (one-man show, breakaway from the PP)

The PSOE won only two provinces (constituencies), Barcelona and Seville.The PP got a seat in Girona (Catalonia), the only province where it had never held a seat.

Note the disproportion in votes/seats between PNV and CiU, which have votes concentrated in small areas, and UPyD and IU, which have broader national appeal.

The only BNP-type far right party in Spain is Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC), which got 59,781 votes, 1.73% in Catalonia equivalent to 0.24% in all of Spain. The Francoist FE de las JONS got 2,901 votes (0.01%)

IU has gone up from 2 to 11 seats as people on the Left move from PSOE. The phenomenon of these parties acting as 'communicating vessels' is well known here. However, the two parties together have lost 50 seats.

Full details here (El País)

My post on Voting in Spain explains the procedure for voting by post and in person, and for counting the votes.

Eurodoom – or perhaps not

While British Eurosceptics are quick to write off the euro as being doomed, those who care to look will see a curious thing. Despite the current crisis the euro has held its own with sterling for the last three years, This graph from Oanda.com shows how there was a great devaluation of sterling in 2008 but since then there has been no real overall change in the exchange rate. Obviously the markets do not see the state of the euro in such dire terms as the British media do. Or perhaps sterling is just as doomed as the euro.

Why Greece won’t leave the euro

Being the economics commentator of what passes in the UK for a serious newspaper doesn’t mean that you have any idea about how the EU works, or indeed about the basic facts of economic life. Yesterday Hamish McRae in the Independent was speculating that Greece will leave the eurozone. It won’t.

Firstly, the legal position is very far from clear. Euro membership is a treaty requirement and is a condition of membership of the EU. There is no specific provision for a country leaving the eurozone. The ECJ would have to rule but it is quite possible that leaving the eurozone would mean leaving the EU itself. That would be possible but it could not happen immediately and, as we will see, time is the important factor here.

Even if there were no legal obstacle to Greece’s leaving the eurozone, what would happen if it wished to do so? It couldn’t be done overnight; it’s not like leaving the ERM or dropping the gold standard. We are talking about changing a currency. There would have to be a fixed exchange rate, and even if that could be negotiated and decided in the utmost secrecy, then what? You can’t say one morning that as of today we are going to use drachmas instead of euros. Where are the notes and coins? They have to be printed and minted, and that could never be done in secret. How will ATMs work? They will have to be adapted. What about prices in shops? How will they be converted immediately? What about taximeters and vending machines? When the euro came in we had two years of its existence as an underlying virtual currency that was valid for commercial purposes (invoicing and accounting for example) but that had no physical existence, and there was a long awareness-raising campaign about the coming change-over followed by a period of dual circulation.

Leaving the euro would be a similar process to joining it and it would take time. So let us imagine that Greece announces that in three months’ time it will leave the euro. Immediately every liquid euro that is not required for minimum day-to-day expenditure will shoot out of the country at the speed of light (literally in the case of electronic transactions). It is after all a currency union. It would be impossible to stop it. So, on D-Day there would be only a tiny amount of euro currency in Greece to convert into new drachmas. For that reason, and because the new drachma would be undesirable in the markets, its value would go down the drain faster than the eye can see. Result? Greece has a worthless currency but still has huge debts that are still denominated in euros. It obviously can’t pay them, so that debt becomes unrecoverable. It is held largely by French and German banks, which will then go bust spectacularly.

So, Greece will not wish to leave the euro*. And it certainly won’t be forced out. And all this is not about rescuing Greece. It is about rescuing stupid, greedy banks that lent money that they never should have lent in the first place.

*Update 2-11-2011: This was posted before Papandreou announced that he would be holding a referendum on whether or not the country should commit economic suicide and drag the rest of the EU down with it.

Popularity of Spanish institutions

One idea that is deeply rooted in Spain is that of giving grades on a scale from 1 to 10, to 1 decimal place and with 5.0 being universally regarded as a pass grade. It is used in schools for marks and is also used in opinion surveys to rate the popularity of institutions and people. This ranking of national institutions appeared in El País on Sunday 21 August.

‘To what extent do these institutions or social groups inspire you with confidence, that is to say that you feel you can trust them?’

Scientists 7.4 Doctors 7.4 Universities 6.8 The public health system 6.8 Police 6.7 Social security 6.6 Small & medium enterprises 6.6 Intellectuals 6.5 The Guardia Civil 6.5 The armed forces 6.5 NGOs 6.2 Charitable foundations 6.0 Radio 5.8 Church institutions (Caritas) 5.8 The King 5.6 The Constitutional Court 5.3 Lawyers 5.2 Big Spanish companies 5.2 Notaries 5.2

The ombudsman 4.8 Judges 4.8 Public officials 4.6 The press (newspapers) 4.7 The Church’s social work 4.7 Prosecutors 4.7 The courts 4.6 Businesspeople 4.6 Multinationals 4.5 Municipal authorities 4.3 Parliament 4.2 Television 4.1 The Catholic Church 4.0 The governments of the autonomous communities 4.0 Savings banks 3.7 The judicial system 3.5 The trade unions 3.3 The bishops 3.1 The present government of Spain 3.0 Banks 2.9 Political parties 2.8 Politicians 2.6

(El País article in Spanish without this chart)

The hellydid

Why oh why do internet journalists not use spell checkers?

Reuters

Servicio Movistar ¡Hazlo tú mismo!

¿Qué hace Movistar cuando el servicio técnico por chat recibe un problema que no sabe resolver, como por ejemplo: No puedo accceder a mis cuentas de correo para eliminar una y añadir otra?

Hay más. Al ejecutar el programa …

No es posible añadir ninguna dirección a la configuración del firewall (Kaspersky). Y la instalación no me pide nada. Me dice que no tengo conexión a Internet. Pero sí tengo, y ¡precisamente con Movistar! Y funciona.

 

Acutaslización. Ahora, tras hora y media de chat, lo tengo funcionando.En primer lugar, Movistar funciona con Internet Exploorer, y no con Firefox.

Extracto del chat:

Analista>fIREFOX da problemas con nuestras páginas sería recomendable que accediera con el explorer o cualquier otro navegador

Yo>Lo intenté con nel analistab anterior. Y no es que Firefox tiene problemas con sus páginas. Es que sus páginas no son elaboradas para funcionar con Firefox

Analista>Eso es un tema aparte, de hecho firefox 4.0 tardo varios meses en ser compatible con nosotros y ahora con la versión 5.0 pasa lo mismo, y solo pasa con ese navegador. Solo necesito que acceda a donde le h pedido y siga los pasos indica

Yo>Me parece que Movistar deberá hacer un esfuerzo para ser compatible con Firefox. ¿Es Telefónica accionista de Microsoft? De todas formas parece que lo tengo funcionando en IE. A ver qué puedo hacer.

Analista>cORRECTO

Y en segundo lugar, rechaza mi contraseña por ser demasiado corta. Introduzco otra. Rechazada. No puede contener repeticiones o secuencias. BIen pero … no contiene ni una ni otra. La tercera vez, sí. Lo tengo.

Y ¿por qué necesito esta dirección adicional? Es para un Blackberry. MIs cuentas existentes quedan bloqueadas cuando se instalan en el BB. Será una cuenta solamente para probar en el BB. ¡Y todo este trabajo para poder resolver otro problema!

The dead waking

South Africa: 'Dead man' wakes up inside morgue

A 50-year-old South African man woke up inside a mortuary over the weekend and screamed to be let out - scaring away attendants who thought he was a ghost.

A grisly story from the BBC, but not unprecedented.

This is from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi:

Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria. In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's PENSION, 1a, Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talk German to me--by request.  One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement-- for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell.  I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons!  So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually? if the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy. But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way with a humbled crest.

The invisible hand

We are in the hands of the financial markets, and it is known that the hand of the market is invisible. But invisible is not the same as anonymous, and this blog can now reveal the owner of those hands.

 

Boycie: Where d’you get those aces from?
Del Boy: Same place you got those kings. I always knew you were cheating, Boycie.
Boycie: Yeah, how?
Del Boy: ’Cause that wasn't the hand that I dealt you.

(For those who don’t know, Wikipedia)

Would you buy a used newspaper off this man?

I wouldn't trust James Murdoch an inch but it is interesting to see that the Guardian has chosen this, of the hundreds of photos of him that it must have available, to illustrate an article entitled:

James Murdoch misled MPs, say former NoW editor and lawyer

Spanish newspapers

As the Economist looks at tabloids it is worth looking at this table (click to enlarge).

I sometimes say that Spain has no tabloid press. Sometimes I am believed and sometimes not, but I stand by what I say. In a country where El Periódico is regarded as a bit strong for some people, and where journalists are expected to report the facts reasonably honestly, British-style tabloids are quite beyond the pale.

So what's this table about? Marca is one of several Spanish dailies that report exclusively on sport; when I say that Spain has no tabloid press I mean the general press. El País is Spain’s biggest-selling newspaper with around 400,000 copies daily (add about 33% for proportional UK figures). It is boring. It makes no pretence to ‘entertain’. It reports facts and carries heavy op-ed pieces. Counting similar general papers, which range across the political spectrum, about 2,000,000 Spanish people buy such papers every day. That is not counting truly local papers.

To return to the Economist, I am not sure but I suspect that Italy's La Gazzetta dello Sport also covers sport exclusively. I can say nothing about the two Japanese titles.

Spanish TV is another matter. There is no shortage of tacky tabloid-style TV programmes.

Met chief resigns

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson has resigned. I said as soon as he was appointed that he was heading for trouble.

He says, ‘my integrity is completely intact.’ Indeed, he is a proud man.

Pulling up the ladder

This letter appears in today’s Observer (my emphasis):

… A necessary condition for getting the chronically unemployed off benefits is a rise in the minimum wage. Simply curtail immigration and the market will up unskilled pay rates. Nothing less than the unthinkable, namely a UK opt out from the EU accord on the free movement of people, will do.

No outsider is going to worry about the social costs of our growing underclass or feel any sense of obligation to do something about it. This is our problem and it can only be resolved by ourselves. It follows that our citizens have priority over would-be immigrants. Home solidarity trumps both international solidarity and unbridled capitalism.

Yugo Kovach, Winterborne Houghton, Dorset

Now it may be the case that the Kovaches have been settled in Dorset since the days of Alfred the Great, or at the very least that one Guy de Kovach was a trusted lieutenant of William the Conqueror. But on the other hand, that may not be the case.

The crisis – as easy as 1, 2, 3.

1. The greedy banks, aided and abetted  by their malevolent friends in the rating agencies, cause untold misery and mayhem in the world’s financial and economic system.
2. The democratic governments of the affected countries are left picking up the pieces. They have an idea. Maybe the banks could play a part in clearing up …
3. The greedy banks, aided and abetted  by their malevolent friends in the rating agencies, kick the democratic governments in the balls and scream, ‘Don’t even think of it or I’ll rip them off with my bare hands, make mincemeat of them, and force them down your throat for tomorrow’s breakfast.’

The return of Cataloniawatch

Candide has restarted his blog. Cataloniawatch is a useful corrective for those who start from the default position that Catalan Nationalism is obviously, necessarily, unarguably and inevitably right.

Along the gutter and down the drain

Seldom has the expression Good riddance to bad rubbish been more literally true than with the closure of the News of the World. It is too much to say that that newspaper itself was responsible for me leaving the country, but when I decided at the age of 25 that my destined career was to be an EFL teacher outside the UK (and there was no shortage of jobs for such people in the country), the smug superiority in morals (private and public) and the holier-than-thou prurience (private and public) that prevailed in the UK were most definitely things that I was extremely glad to get away from. And though it was 1978 when I finally left to live abroad permanently, the same applied in the pre-Murdoch days in which I grew up. This is about the Profumo scandal (1963).

04 Editor Of Sunday News

 

Writing the script

If it’s Greece, it must be a drama – a tragedy for preference. Such is the tramline thinking of the British media.

Adrian Hamilton says in the Independent:

the Greek parliament has voted to pass the "crucial" budget cuts, albeit with the narrowest of majorities

and a Guardian editorial tells us that

the package was voted through by a wafer-thin majority

In fact the voting was 155 yes, 138 no, 5 abstentions.

Admittedly the outcome of the vote was uncertain. One deputy was expelled from the government party for saying he would vote against. That left them with 154, still a majority of the 300 seats in the Greek parliament. So it seems that one opposition member voted with the government. But anyway, a majority of 17 out of 300 is obviously not ‘the narrowest of majorities’ (which would be a majority of one, Mr Hamilton), nor can it reasonably be described as ‘wafer-thin’.

The Great British passport scandal

Just the other day I mentioned the problems of obtaining  a British passport outside the UK – the scandalous cost and the bureaucratic problems involved. Today (and coincidentally as far as I know) this letter has appeared in the Independent.

I wonder if British citizens, thinking about emigration perhaps, know what the Government's latest earner is for its passport-holders abroad? Now the only means of obtaining a new passport is by application to Düsseldorf – "UK in Germany" – via the web. According to their leaflet, "We look forward to welcoming our overseas customers."

Customers? What happened to citizens? One is expected to post the passport (that may not have run out yet of course), with bank details, by courier across borders then pay them for the return. The charge is €150 for the "service" plus shipping.

If one wants to find out about the process, we cannot call Düsseldorf but only an outsourced company in the UK – and must have credit card ready to pay a minimum of £3.50. They give different information from what is on the consulate's website.

Nobody in real Europe believes us that such things are possible.

Brian Banks, Warsaw

The great British passport scam is indubitably an earner for the British State.With passports valid for 10 years there must be round about 4,000,000 of them issued every year. I am convinced that this is one reason (there are others) why the UK refuses to join the Schengen Agreement on passport-free travel.

It is also worth pointing out something that seems to have eluded British anti-ID crusaders. The plasticised page at the back of a UK passport, which is internationally standardised, contains the same information as is on an ID card in other countries. So anyone who has a passport has already given the State bureaucracy the relevant data anyway!

The eurozone

This graph (El País 6-6-11, click to enlarge) is what underlies all serious comment* on the problems facing the eurozone. It shows the difference in yields (country risk) on 10-year bonds between Germany (reference) and the countries that the 'Anglo-Saxons' insultingly refer to as PIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain. It starts at the left in January (E for enero) 2010 and runs to June 2011. The vertical scale is in hundredths of one per cent: Spain has to pay 2.241% more interest on its debt than Germany does.

The graph clearly shows the panic in early May last year, when the euro was in serious danger. That was the weekend following the British general election and the British media were obviously preoccupied with other things but the risk was real, and Angela Merkel's own preoccupation with a Land election that Sunday (which she lost anyway) caused her to delay the inevitable and necessary action until it was very nearly too late.

However, the really important point from Spain's point of view is what happened in late July. Until then Spain had pretty well mirrored the other three countries (though some way below them) but on 23 July the bank stress tests were published and Spain immediately separated itself from the general trend. The figures were there for all to see, but actually believing that a Mediterranean country can manage its affairs properly is alien to the northern mind-set, even though anyone who looked at the matter knew that Spain's banks had been forbidden by the Bank of Spain to buy dodgy US mortgages and were in fact remarkably healthy. In those stress tests Spain exposed 90% of its banking system. The minimum, adhered to by most countries, was 50%. That way, Germany and other countries could conceal some real horrors. The published figures showed Santander alone holding more Greek debt than all of Germany because it had issued a small amount of properly guaranteed trade credit while no German bank let on that it even held any Greek state debt!

Spain has problems. It is not completely out of the woods. There is a lot of debt in the Autonomous Communities and a lot of fuss has been made of it following the recent elections, which handed the PP a landslide. But for all its centralising nature, when the PP runs a community its barons want as much local power as they can get and have not been slow to become indebted themselves; and with something like 60% (from memory) of Spain's GDP spent outside Madrid, its effect on the national economy is very considerable. This is not a surprise, however. The nature of Spain's system of government is not a secret, and many banks will have made provisions already to deal with the problem.

The problem -- and this is surprising -- is with Germany. I have known Germany well all my life and I know that the country has always been remarkably well governed. There have been ups and downs of course, but overall its domestic and foreign policy has been well managed -- until the arrival of Angela Merkel. Her inward-looking nationalism is both a surprise and a disappointment. One purpose of the EU was to produce a European Germany rather than a German Europe. The latter is being forced on us by events and I for one don't object to it in principle, but the narrowness of the German view is not good for anyone. The idea of the German ants and the Mediterranean grasshoppers overlooks the fact that the German trade surplus has only been possible because people in Mediterranean countries have been buying German products and -- yes -- getting in debt to do so. But a large part of that debt is held by German banks, and any default will affect Germany itself. Merkel's comments show more influence from Bild Zeitung than a sensible politician should allow, and her recent comment that Spain's retirement age was lower than Germany's was plain, factually wrong.

Which brings me on to the famous cucumbers. They have nothing to do with the euro, but the immediate response of the Hamburg Health Senator (Minister) to blame Spain, when the cause of the problem was, as we now know, very close to her own home, simply smacks of the typical north European arrogance towards southerners that has been much in evidence during this long financial crisis.

*As opposed to the ignorance of the British media (e.g. the Guardian 'Spain [is] an obvious candidate for some close attention from the bond market vigilantes.' (as if it wasn't already)) and the malevolence of the ratings agencies.

A British passport for a British citizen – if you persevere and have cash on hand

I have mentioned some of my own problems with British bureaucracy, including passport incompetence. Here is a true horror story from someone who found herself in the unfortunate necessity of obtaining a British passport.

My passport expires in 2014. Perhaps I still have time to get Spanish nationality.

Non sequitur and cucumbers

According to the BBC (my emphasis):

Derek Hargreaves of Britain's Cucumber Growers' Association told the BBC on Thursday that he feared the outbreak would affect British producers if the source of the E. coli remained unknown.

"If this keeps rolling on and the Germans don't find the source of the outbreak, then obviously people are going to say 'well, there's no point in listening to experts, they've all got it wrong,' people will stop buying the salads."

A contender for the non sequitur of the year competition one might think – except that in the British context he may, depressingly, be right.He also has a strong line in pessimism, which won’t do his trade association much good.