The Taking of Bambi 123

In yet another effort to unseat Pedro Sánchez, Manos Limpias (wiki) has made a complaint against José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for money laundering. This follows from an accusation made by Victor Aldama (a businessman released from jail to help investigations against the PSOE) on a conspiracy TV show called Horizonte. It’s now in front of the court. There had been some sub judice investigations prior to these revelations - circled around Zapatero's relationship with the Venezuelan government. 

From El Mundo here, ‘The judge identifies Zapatero as the "leader" of an "influence peddling" network to rescue the Plus Ultra airline and earn two million euros (for his efforts). The court notified the former president this Tuesday of his summons, requiring him to appear on June 2nd. The National Court has charged Zapatero with money laundering, and the police have searched his office and his daughters' company’.  

 El País in English fully explains the case here. The visibly indignant ex-president issued a statement following his indictment in the Caso Plus Ultra, releasing a video reaffirming that his public and private activities have been conducted "with absolute respect for the law". Or not.

A later story says that the Spanish court received inflammatory information about  Zapatero from the US 'Homeland Security Investigations' in what might be a plan from the White House to destabilise Spain. As usual, no proof has been offered or found. The judge closed Zapatero's bank account on Thursday. 

From Aspero Mundo here: 'The investigating judge had a technically impeccable option: to take Zapatero's statement before formally charging him. He could have summoned him as a suspect, listened to his version of events, compared the evidence with his explanations, and only then decided on the level of the charges. This is the option any careful investigating judge chooses when the suspect is available, has a known address, has publicly offered his version of events, and occupies an institutional position whose public exposure multiplies the cost of any procedural error.

He did not choose this option. He formally charged him first, applied the most serious charges—criminal organization, not mere cooperation; leadership, not mere participation—and then summoned him to testify on June 2, 2026. The public damage caused by the charges was done before the former president could explain anything...'

Regardless of the outcome, the damage to Zapatero is irreparable.

As another ex-president José María Aznar said: ‘El que pueda hacer, que haga’.

Gabriel Rufián (ERC) speaking in the Cortes on Wednesday ‘For all of us on the left – if this is true, then it’s una mierda. If it’s another right-wing scam, then it’s an even bigger mierda (video)’.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is remembered for taking Spain out of George W Bush’s Iraq war and bringing about the end of ETA (Wiki). His nickname when president (2004 - 2011) was 'Bambi' and he is kind of a Spanish version, I think, of Jimmy Carter. 

Opinion from El Plural: ‘The CIS (Spanish Centre for Sociological Research) had once again accurately predicted the Andalusian elections, triggering alarm bells for the Spanish right-wing media and political establishment. In that same April poll, the CIS said that the PSOE were leading the PP by almost 13 points nationally. Amid this climate of widespread nervousness, the Partido Popular and its affiliated groups have chosen a primary target to destabilize the government and the PSOE: José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. This is not a casual or merely retrospective attack, but rather a cold and calculated strategy to neutralize the socialists' most effective electoral asset and thus prevent another right-wing debacle in the upcoming general elections…’

From 20Minutos here: ‘Feijóo demands Sánchez resign, but the president closes ranks with Zapatero and affirms that "there will be elections in 2027."’.

Anything said or done or alleged by someone regarding the PSOE is immediately investigated, while other things with much greater national impact are left until later (sometimes, much later). You might believe it or you might not, according to your politics, but you know it’s a frame-up.

Only the (Very) Best

Vox brings overt racism to politics. The Vox-proposed ‘Prioridad Nacional’ (sometimes unkindly rendered as ‘Prioridad Nazional’ with a z) is raising all kinds of criticism. The thrust is that anyone, ideally, with a Spanish father and Spanish mother should come first, before all those foreigners. So far and in order to hold on to their crowns, the PP has accepted this ugly piece of Vox dogma in both Extremadura and Aragón.  

Opinion from elDiario.es: ‘Prioridad Nacional: a moral downfall. The investiture of María Guardiola this week has highlighted how the Partido Popular, far from distancing itself from Vox's racist and xenophobic positions, is adopting them as part of its ideology. Including national priority as a basis for potential aid constitutes, in addition to a breach of the principle of equality and non-discrimination, a true moral failing because it allows for distinctions between people when it comes to receiving basic state services…’

Opinion from Público: ‘Don't say "national priority", say "discrimination based on origin": the concept the far right is trying to push’.

LaSexta here: ‘"National priority" throughout Spain, Abascal's objective for his racist measure (so far) are agreed with the PP in both Extremadura and Aragon’.

The Guardian sums it up here: ‘Hard line on immigration adopted by the Partido Popular as the right seeks to overthrow the socialist government in 2027’.

The problem with this policy, popular in its day with the Austrian house painter and his concept of the untermenschen, and now found in both the Middle East (think Palestine) and the USA (ICE), is that such a thing could become policy in Spain. I exaggerate? Maybe.

First they came for the foreigners, then for the homosexuals, then for the communists, then for the women voters...

In short, the basic concept – whether expanded or not – goes that Spaniards should be first and immigrants should be at the back of the queue for health and other services. For those who agree with this - the link to the Vox page that will reserve for you a wrist bracelet with the Spanish red, yellow, red colours emblazoned with Prioridad Nacional is here. 

From Cordópolis here: ‘Sánchez responds to the PP-Vox pacts: “The true ‘national priority’ for Spain is peace, employment, and guaranteed public services”, he says. In a pre-campaign rally for the Andalusian elections, the President contrasted his vision for the country with the agreements of the right and far right, accusing them of “violating” a “sacred principle of the Constitution: non-discrimination”’.

Andalucía Goes to the Polls

Andalucía was always ‘Red’ right up until recent times.

Up to, and after the Civil War, the enormous estates that made up the fertile part of the region was under the thumb of the latifundistas, the absent landlords from Madrid and elsewhere.

During the War, or at least until the fascists regained control, the land was run (no doubt ineptly) by the colectivos. The worker soviets. The cities were impoverished, and many people – those that could – had moved away to Catalonia, Algeria, France, Germany and where possible, Mexico and South America. A figure given suggests 2,700,000 emigrated in search of a better life elsewhere.

The huge majority of the andaluces in those difficult times were lefties – perhaps understandably – and when Franco eventually went to His Reward in 1975, Spain soon threw forth a progressive leader from Seville – Felipe González and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, the PSOE.

Spain took off, under the new democracy, but Andalucía, always poor and forgotten by Madrid, continued to lag far behind. Its regional government, based in Seville and held by PSOE figures, was noted for its corruption.

Seville: not only the capital of Andalucía’s eight provinces, but also its wealthiest. They say that the money came in – but it never left to be distributed in the satellite provinces (particularly Almería, at almost seven hours by train).

Poor leadership: Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán caught in the ERE scandal; Susana Díaz, inept and then the one after her… (you know, I’m not even going to bother to look him up).

Now, in 2026, those people are all gone – some with prison sentences, others deserving of them. Even Felipe González, Seville’s most famous son, is now under a cloud.

The Junta de Andalucía, the regional authority, is currently in the hands of a conservative. He’s Juanma Moreno, perhaps the third or fourth in importance in the whole of the PP. Elections are to be held on May 17th and he’ll no doubt get in again.

How did the voters come to switch their allegiances?

For one thing, they discovered a social class below them: the immigrants.

Second, as above, they saw the corruption and graft in the socialist camp.

Thirdly, simply voting conservative gives one, at least and if nothing else, the sensation of having joined the middle classes.

And life goes on. Only, it doesn’t if you get ill.

Juanma Moreno, like Isabel Díaz Ayuso in Madrid, has been supporting the private health sector at the expense of the public one. Ayuso is stained with the unnecessary deaths of the 7,291 elderly folk in the residencias during the Covid, Juanma has the problem of the lost breast cancer results which affected several thousand women. They have both been seen to be dismantling their regional public health systems.

The PSOE-A only has the one shot at the moment in its electioneering (despite having a senior ex-Government minister as their candidate), and that’s the state of the Servicio Andaluz de Sanidad. The public health service is clearly underfunded and being drained by the private sector – and there are many who don’t have the funds for private insurance.

The elections in Andalucía will probably run as expected, but supposing Moreno has to come to a deal with Vox. Will their ‘national priority’ put me back at the far end of the waiting list, in a public hospital that is sorely underfinanced?

 

Political Posturing

There was a meeting of the world’s main socialist leaders (well, the western ones anyway) in Barcelona late last week, with the presidents or prime ministers of Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, South Africa and so on: President Sánchez the host. As the Madrid leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso said cattily, a world meeting of narco-states. Having offended half of the planet, Ayuso then gave Venezuela’s María Corina Machado a golden gong during that worthy’s brief visit to Spain on Saturday to meet Feijóo and Abascal (Edmundo González, the old boy who either won or didn’t win the Venezuelan election last year and is now living in exile in Madrid -at the invitation of Sánchez- couldn’t make the event down to an age-related illness).

Whether Ayuso’s medal plus a Golden Key to the City donated to the Venezuelan leader by the Mayor of Madrid will both end up in Donald Trump’s massive trophy cabinet along with Corina’s Nobel Peace Prize and so many others, remains to be seen.

Another story this past week was the regularization of up to half a million foreigners already living in Spain but without the proper paperwork. Mostly Latin Americans, but, yes, some Muslims and Africans too. Feijóo says he will go through them with a magnifying glass when he becomes president.

Since he can only reach that noble station with the support of Vox, one can believe that he means it.

Indeed, the share-out of the first of the regional elections – Extremadura back in December – has now been resolved following acquiescence over 74 points from Santiago Abascal’s party. Vox takes the vice presidency and two departments: social services and agriculture.

The reason to call the elections last autumn in the first place was to get rid of the Voxxers, but precisely the opposite occurred, and it’s no surprise to see that their benign support didn’t come cheap. Vox continues to deny gender violence and uses broad strokes in its denialist speeches against renewable energies or the green agenda. And then there’s the migrant issue (or ‘institutional racism’ to give it its correct title), where migrants (that includes us guiris as well), will be placed at the back of the queue for the doctor and any other public services guaranteed in the Constitution under the execrable concept of ‘National Priority’…

María Guardiola, the president of Extremadura, in 2023: “I cannot allow those who deny gender violence or who are dehumanizing immigrants to enter the government.”

That is precisely what she has just signed, after four months of increasingly frantic negotiations with Vox. As Groucho Marx said: ‘I have my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others’.

Foreigners in Extremadura are just 4.7% - far from the national average of 14%, indeed the total population of the region is shrinking, but the Voxxers are on a roll.

Short of obtaining Spanish nationality, migrants of course don’t have the vote. 

So it’s no burkas in the streets (they are as rare as hen’s teeth in Extremadura, but one has a point to make). As for denying health attention to the foreigners – will that somehow stop them from sneezing on you? As the journalist Ignacio Escolar says, discriminating against the foreigners won’t make them disappear, it only makes their life harder.

Two (rather larger) regions were facing the same dilemma – whether to bow to the far-right (as Aragón finally did late Wednesday afternoon) and Castilla y León, again with a PP majority but needing Vox, and then there’s the Region of Andalucía which will be voting on May 17th (we read that the PP is apparently a little short of a full majority there, according to the pollsters).

If – let’s call it ‘the Extremadura Experiment’ – shows the PP prepared to submit to Vox on certain points which won’t cost them votes, then this will be the larger plan for when Spain goes to the polls next year. After all, there are no more frontiers against the far-right: ‘I am a democrat who respects election results’, says Feijóo.  

They might be illegal, or bordering on the illegal, but a new PP/Vox government can (and will) change the laws it considers to be in error, granting ‘a national priority’ in social services to those with a DNI card.

Progressive voters must find what inspiration they can from Pedro Sánchez’ words last week at the Global Progressive Mobilization Summit of world leaders in Barcelona opposed to the policies of Donald Trump and his diminishing group of admirers: "The far right and its lackeys make a lot of noise, a lot of tweets. But these extremists aren’t shouting because they're winning, they're shouting because they know their time is running out." 

We shall see.   

Crazy End Days (as in 'Nuts')

 

Following the embarrassing prayer-meeting with twenty or so preachers clutching Donald Trump in the Oval Office (while decrying a possibly similar scene in Teheran), we read of the, ah, ‘End Days’. 

‘How The War In Iran Is Setting The Stage For A Future Prophetic Battle’ says Harbinger’s Daily (‘World News Biblically Understood’) here. The question is – how seriously do the Americans take ‘the Rapture’, the End Times’ and The Book of Revelations?   

The Guardian reminds us of billionaire Peter Thiel and his lectures on ‘the antichrist’ here.  

The Independent has: How the Iran war is underpinned by ‘end times’ religious fervour in Washington and Teheran. An overlapping belief in end times, or the second coming, underpins much of the motivation in the corridors of power in Washington and in the bunkers where the ayatollahs hide today…’

See, it’s hard to fight crazy.

Twenty Years Later, and Something has Changed

One of the most prominent memories in the Spanish scrapbook, along with the picture of the caudillo under the heading ¡Españoles, Franco ha Muerto! and another of the rebel Guardia Civil Antonio Tejero firing his revolver into the ceiling of Las Cortes, the Spanish Parliament, would be the smiling and unctuous photograph of José María Aznar along with Tony Blair and George W Bush at their meeting in the Azores on the eve of the (Second) American Gulf War and invasion of Iraq twenty three years ago this month.

Aznar paid dearly (as did Spain) for getting this country involved in a foreign adventure, especially so a year later on March 11 2004 when Arab terrorists planted some bombs in the local Madrid railway system, killing 193 people and wounding some 2,000 more.

Aznar compounded his error by blaming the wrong set of assassins, the Basque ETA group rather than Al Qaeda. This cost his party the general election just two days later, allowing the PSOE leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to become the new president of Spain.

One of his first acts was to reverse Spain’s participation in the war against Saddam.

The question of course now arises – what policy would an actual PP/Vox government have taken following the current Israeli/American attack against Iran?

As we don’t have such a leadership, let us look instead at Pedro Sánchez.

I like a quote of his: ‘Spain opposes this catastrophe. Because we understand that governments are there to improve people’s lives, to solve problems, not to worsen them. And it is unacceptable that leaders who are incapable of fulfilling this task use the smokescreen of war to mask their incompetence and line the pockets of a select few’. Donald Trump answered this by saying roughly – ‘who needs Spain anyway?’

That remains to be seen; as much of the European Union, after a certain hesitation, now appears to agree with Sánchez. Although, you see, there’s Feijóo ‘and his Mariachis’ who of course continue to see themselves as vassals of Trump. A plan which is not playing well with much of the Spanish electorate.

Why do the conservatives here (with their allies in the Media) always try and sink the Spanish ship of state?

68% of Spaniards, says El País, say they are against Trump and Netanyahu’s war, with 23% being in favour. Even El Mundo (a conservative newspaper) can’t do much better, with 62% against the war (although we are told in the same headline that those respondents prefer China to the USA).

We see that the right-wing’s patriotism, it seems, has exceptions. It works against immigration, against separatists, against the left, against anyone who doesn't subscribe to the right's short-sighted view of Spain. But it vanishes the moment a thug with an American flag arrives and orders everyone to stand at attention.

Sánchez says – before we all cry ¡No Pasarán! – ‘The people must be aware that what may happen to their wallets has nothing to do with the decisions of the Spanish Government, but with a war in Iran that is illegal and that will bring much suffering.”

We’ve already seen the rise in petrol prices and the next electric bill won’t be far behind.

The Guardian reckons that Pedro Sánchez is ‘one of the very few European leaders to openly and emphatically reject the demands of a US president whose trademark negotiating style is an erratic mix of bullying, humiliation and self-aggrandisement’.

The war (or invasion) has had some bad press, from torpedoing an apparently unarmed Iranian frigate in international waters, to callously bombing a girls’ school with at least 165 children dead. Then there was the obscene prayer-meeting in the Oval Office (our fundamentalists are better than their fundamentalists) as ‘non-commissioned officers were elsewhere being told that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”’. Not my Jesus, Buddy.

Let’s give Sánchez the last word: ‘Es un orgullo ser español. Por defender lo que defendemos ante la barbarie y ante la guerra’. It is a source of pride to be Spanish. For defending what we defend in the face of barbarism and war.