Category Archives: Living la vida española

Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (aka, ZP), has been promoting an Alliance of Civilizations as the solution to the so-called Clash of Civilizations that he and some others believe to be the root of violent extremism (aka, radical Islamic fundamentalism). Just which “civilizations” he is talking about is anyone’s guess, considering that Islam, since I last checked, has never been a civilization. Like Christianity, Islam is a religion that exists and has existed across many different continents, cultures, and civilizations.

I wonder whether ZP has any similar proposals to solve the problems of Spain’s own domestic terrorism woes, with two separate bombing over the past two days. Should we believe that there is a Clash of Spanish Civilizations and a need for an Alliance? Or should we conclude, like so many people do in the Spain and the West about Islam, that there is something inherently backward about the Spanish people that we should fear all things Spanish and even Catholics (as Catholicism is protected by the Spanish Constitution)? Should we panic if we see someone on our plane wearing a t-shirt with Spanish written on it or even speaking the language? Should we put wiretap on churches, private religious schools, and investigate non-profit Catholic foundations? Yes, I know that these ETA terrorists are just a tiny radicalized minority from one small region, but similar facts have not stopped ZP from considering extremism in other regions of the world to be rooted in culture and conflicting civilizations.

Even the perennial loser, opposition leader Mariano Rajoy, has had a thing or two to say about the ill effects of religious extremism on civilizations. Last year Rajoy proposed to protect women’s rights by regulating the use of the veil or headscarf in public places. This is particularly a problem in my Madrileño barrio of Chamberí, except that the great majority of the women you see in the streets with their heads covered are nuns who wear their full traditional religious attire when teaching in the semi-public local Catholic school. Personally, I think we should stop talking about the problem and just shut the convent down. Either that or U.S. air strikes, preferably by drones to limit military casualties.

Today people across Europe are voting for those politicians who will theoretically represent them before the European Parliament. Unfortunately, just like with Spain’s unrepresentative electoral system, many EU states’ Parliament members are elected through closed lists — where only the candidate at the top of each list has actually been publicly debated — is a total sham, completely void of accountability, and a mind-boggling offense to the taxpayers and their wallets.

For example, I was just looking at the present list of Spanish members of the European Parliament. I don’t think I recognized a single one. There were 54 of them from a handful of parties, including 22 from PP and 24 from PSOE. So imagine that of these 22 PP and 24 PSOE elected officials only two of them were ever publicly debated or vetted prior to the election, and the remainder’s qualifications were never discussed. They are like stealth politicians, flying below the radar, and as a result, their performance is never publicly evaluated to determine whether they deserve to continue receiving the salary that we, the tax-payers, finance.

It is no wonder then that EU elections have such incredibly low voter turn-out. As long as the voter is so far removed from their so-called elected officials and is therefore not treated as a constituent, the EU will continue to lack real, voter-earned political legitimacy.

Two aspects of Spain’s democracy have always struck me as being contrary to the very principles of democratic governance: its questionable separation of powers and lack of political accountability.

The first of these is the lack of a clear separation of powers, especially between the executive and legislative branches of government, but also with respect to the powers delegated to the judicial branch. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that Spain is a constitutional monarchy wherein the King is the ultimate head of state. Nevertheless, the basic functions of the executive branch, as assumed by the president and his ministries, are in practice inseparable from the majority rule of the legislature.

In other words, the president and the congressional majority are one and the same. Much of this is due to Spain’s system of electing its president and congressional representatives. Instead of voting to elect individual representatives for specific congressional seats, there is a single “presidential” election, and each party presents one presidential candidate plus a fixed, closed list of potential congressional representatives (for both the senate and the lower legislative chamber). Based on the pro-rata share of the votes, the congressional seats are allocated accordingly between each party, and the party with the majority of votes wins the presidency.

When the president takes office and assumes power, his cabinet members and ministers generally serve in the legislature as well. For example, Carme Chacón is both the Minister of Defense and a representative in congress. This same lack of a Chinese wall standing between the executive and legislative branches is also replicated at the regional level (i.e., Esperanza Aguirre, the president of the Madrid autonomous region is also a representative in Madrid’s legislature).

The immediate result is that the voice of the presidency and the legislature’s majority is one and the same, united and indivisible. Any disputes that could possibly arise within the ruling party are always settled in private; thus leading to a total lack of transparency or public inter-party debate. This inevitably leads to the alienation of local interests at the national level. There are two principle reasons for this: public differences on policies are strictly prohibited by the party, even though it is only logical that constituents from different regions will likely have differing political interests on any given matter (what’s good for one locality may not be good for another), and, as I will explain further below, the representatives are accountable to their party alone and not to their supposed constituents. Continue reading →

Here we go again. Today in an article in the major Spanish daily El Mundo on how the Feria de Abril (a yearly festival in Seville) is being celebrated in Beijin, Rocío Sáez ,with what I assume to be the permission of El Mundo’s editorial staff, dubs the event the “Feria de los ojos rascados” or the “slanty-eyed” version of the Feria.

We can argue to death whether this is racism (yes, you can be racist without intention), gross cultural insensitivity, or pure ignorance. But no one can deny that after the entire debate last summer about the Spanish men’s olympic basketball team’s gesture towards the Chinese, reported in El Mundo, you have to wonder just how dumb the El Mundo staff must be to fall into the same trap. Or just how poor the state of journalism must be over at El Mundo these days.

I am also getting tired of repeating this over and over again, but we are not caricatures.

I have already written about the innocent/ignorant brand of racism in Spain. Nevertheless, it continues to surprise me that people in Spain still haven’t gotten the message. For example, the depiction of black people as caricatures in blackface (this is commonly done in Spain with products from Cuba or Africa), directly alluding to the extremely racist minstrel shows, is beyond all measures of offensive conduct.

Nevertheless, a Spanish company with all the best intentions of praising Barack Obama can go ahead and market a blackfaced, ultra-racist cookie (called Obamitas) without anyone in the country blinking an eye. When will the new century begin?