Humpty-dumpty parliament

Sometimes silence is better than gold, dear reader. And today is one such day. When I got up this morning, it was with the intent of writing an elaborate, lengthy, well-argued and utterly profound analysis of yesterday’s general elections in Spain. But what do you think I discovered, when – for a quick check-up - I re-read previous political comments Alfred B Mittington had made? Well, I discovered that the Mittington Analysis of the municipal elections of May 24^th last, is still perfectly valid and applicable to yesterday’s national elections! All you need to do is ignore the timeframe and pretend we’re talking about the national parliament instead of local councils. Read it here if you’re interested.

So that simply leaves giving you yesterday’s results and the forecast for the future. The former is pretty easy; the latter less so. Limiting myself to the four big parties that really matter the seats won in the Madrid Cortes are:

PP (conservative)       123

Ciudadanos (liberal)     40

PSOE (socialist)          90

Podemos (radical left)  69

This result is hailed as a triumph by the two new parties (Ciudadanos and Podemos) and by everyone who is sick or tired of the old petrified two-party system in which PP and PSOE alternated in power, both abusing it to their heart’s delight when their turn came. However, it is one thing to applaud a socio-political watershed for the history book, Max Weber style; and quite another to govern a country in deep trouble, like Spain is today. This fragmented, shattered & scattered, parliament obliges the political leadership to form some sort of coalition; and even if Spaniards were temperamentally fit for that (and believe me they are not!), it would still be an impossible job, as no workable combination (i.e. naturally left-leaning or right-leaning) reaches the parliamentary majority of 176 in the 350 seat lower house.

You can do the math for yourselves; but believe ol’ Al’ when he says that there are only two, equally unthinkable combinations which add up numerically.

The first is a coalition of the PP and the PSOE, good for over 210 seats This would be a laugh, after the 40 years these two have been at each other’s throats like Cain and Abel, and it would immediately be seen as the Coalition of the Biparty Dinosaurs, trying to hold on to their old dominance of power. Let’s see how well that goes down with an electorate which has just shown it is sick and tired of just that.

'You first…' - 'No! You!'

The second is what was already dubbed long ago as the Coalition of Losers: PSOE, Podemos and Ciudadanos, leaving the formal victor out of the loop. In a northern country, like Germany or The Netherland, this might work, as these places have a long democratic history and much experience with the subtleties of coalition-building and maintaining stability. But Spanish democracy is young and passions are strong and honour is a (deadly) virtue among the Dons. So I fail to see how these Three Graces could possibly decide upon a threesome. I mean: one of them would have to undress first, and then they’d have to agree upon all sorts of positions…

In short: Spain is living in interesting times, as the Chinese curse goes.

You want my wildest guess as to the future? My wildest guess is that they will put in some minority government supported by the tiny arms of a whole range of Lilliput lower house factions. It will be the shortest-lived government of Spanish democracy; and in 2016 we’ll have new elections. And then let’s see if the Bipartisan Jurassic truly ended yesterday evening…

Victory has many orphans...

A victory of King Phyrrus

It is remarkable, dear reader, how electoral results can be differently perceived by different cultures. Allow me to explain.

Last Sunday 24 May, municipal and provincial elections were held in Spain. The results were not surprising (since they had been pretty adequately predicted) but still represented a thorough shake-up of dusty things.

On a national scale, the governing PP, conservative, pocketed some 27 % of the vote. This was down about 10 % from earlier elections, both general and local, in 2011. The opposition PSOE, socialist, reached some 25 %, about 5 % less than in 2011. Two new upstart parties, scions of the economic crisis and popular indignation over widespread corruption, did not do too badly. The centre-left-yet-often-right-of-centre (yeah, square me that circle!) Cuidadanos party got almost 7 % of the vote nationwide, and the flamboyant, radical left Podemos, in so far as it may be calculated (for politico-philosophical reasons, they did not participate in every town and province), seems to attract anywhere between 10 and 20 %.

How would you read these results (assuming you are not yourself Spanish)? Well: in any northern democracy based on Proportional Representation, this would count as a resounding victory for the PP. Not only the party won the most votes nationwide, but it also ended up as the biggest party in most towns, cities and provinces. Yes, of course they lost a big chunk of the vote compared with previous elections; but their performance is not short of a miracle, considering that the party has been in office for four hard years; that its mayor accomplishment consists in not making the economic situation any worse; that, in order to do so, its government took from the poor to give to the rich; and finally that it is riddled with so many cases of astounding, shameless, mind-boggling corruption from the very highest levels to the lowest, that it might be said to be corrupt up to its bone-marrow.

But how are these results read by Spaniards themselves, on television, in the papers, and in the social media? Well, rather differently, to put it mildly. There is deep depression and near panic in the PP, and jubilant euphoria in all their adversaries, because the reigning party has suffered such a considerable setback. The crux seems to be, that losing Power Absolute, which the PP enjoyed in countless places and still enjoys in the national parliament, and which, apparently, is seen as the only manner of governing efficiently, equals total defeat, a thing of horrible shame, a catastrophe of epic proportions.

Meanwhile, the two new upstart parties tire not of pointing out that Change has now begun and that the old tradition bi-party system of the last 40 years, which divided and alternated power equally between PP and PSOE, has come to a final end. A fresh new rosy-fingered dawn is here to stay and usher in the Millennium…

On the bottom right: sour grapes

Where they get it from frankly beats me. For the above results - in the humble view of Alfred B Mittington - spell neither catastrophe for the PP nor the Glorious Dawning of The Age of Aquarius for our fresh new players in the Spanish political arena.

For starters: it remains to be seen if the unstoppable forward march of the new ‘third way parties’ indeed holds out, or if, in due time, things swing back, the ‘waters return to their riverbed’ as the Spaniards say, and ‘bi-partyism’ re-establishes itself once again. Podemos, for one, typically peaked last December, and Ciudadanos may have done well for a first time contender, but 7 % of the vote is not exactly a landslide…

More importantly still is the fact that Ciudadanos and Podemos did not arrogate to themselves the main part of their vote from the two traditional behemoths, but got their gains mainly from earlier ‘third way’ small groupings. Ciudadanos simply obliterated a party called UPyD, with whom it even tried to merge a few months ago; while Podemos absorbed an immense share of the vote from the old, senior far-left party Izquierda Unida. So much for Crucial Change.

Lastly, there is the little hurdle of Spanish electoral law which – much as I find it impossible to truly fathom – has all the qualities and pitfalls of Britain’s First Past The Post system, heavily favouring the bigger parties and local chauvinistic ones. If in the General Elections of next autumn, the results are numerically comparable to the ones of last Sunday, both new parties will attract a nice share of the vote, but will see their gains reduced to smithereens when it comes to seats in Parliament. This was always the fate of Izquierda Unida, which invariably got loads of votes nationwide, which then translated into a mere handful of seats; while localist and separatist parties, concentrated in a single linguistic and cultural area, got many more seats for far fewer votes (1). Just as in Britain (remember Ukip, the Greens and the SNP), the weight of your vote depends on where you cast it; almost as if different kinds of gravity were at work in different spots of the electoral landscape.

What next? Well, everything is really on hold until the next General Elections this autumn. Due to the splintered results, in all sorts of town halls and most provinces, coalition governments must somehow be welded together. This is no easy thing in Spain, where parties thoroughly dislike and despise one another and ruling by unassailable absolute majority is the greatest political pleasure. In some spots, where various national and local opposition parties have raked in sufficient seats, both traditional big parties may perhaps be kept out of local government. But in many others where either PP or PSOE made a strong enough showing, life is going to be a bitch. For neither Ciudadanos nor Podemos – whose very essence and trademark is the battle again the bi-party system – can for the moment afford to be seen as just another spineless coalition partner helping to power one of the big parties whom they always said they abhorred.

Naturally, Ciudadanos has it easier here than Podemos. The I’m-as-right-wing-as-I’m-left-wing formation can conceivably strike some deals with the PP and some with the PSOE, say something lofty about Governability and putting the Country First, and maintain their immaculate political virginity since they sleep with both opponents. Podemos, however, does not have that option. It can and will never strike a deal with the arch-enemy PP, and so has to reveal itself as the handmaid to the Social Democrats or, alternatively, open itself up to criticism of only wanting total power and not helping out to give citizens good governance. In short: whatever they do, they are doomed.

It will be a true mess over the next six months; but will there be true change? I doubt it. And so good old Alfred B Mittington, who has seen it all over a long long lifetime, predicts that there will be no earthquake at all next November. There will only be a minor landslide of mud.

(1) Essentially this system was designed back in the late 1970s to ensure the support of the Basque and Catalan nationalistic forces for the post-Dictatorship Constitution. As such it made sense at the time. The consequences are, however, somewhat wry. In the 2008 general elections, for instance, Izquierda Unida, with 1,000,000 votes, received 2 seats in the Cortes. The bourgeois-nationalistic Catalan CiU, with 775,000, got 11 seats. The left radical Catalan ERC scored 3 seats on the basis of 300,000 votes. And - top of the pops! – the bourgeois-nationalistic Basque PNV got 6 seats for a mere 303,000 votes, which means three times more MPs for a third of the votes raked in by IU… A factor of 9!

Get my Goat!

I am, dear reader, no fan of goats. I almost like them as little as rabbits (and you gourmets who follow my cook blog know what I think of them nasty buggers, don’t you?). Goats are ugly, they stink, possess a most unpleasant personality, and excel in horrid dietary practises, stripping innocent trees of their green sprouts, and occasionally devouring newspapers and  - worse – the 11^th volume of my Collected Works (‘Brief writings on natural history and the meaning of the universe’), as one particularly vile and ghastly billy goat dared to do back in the summer of 1963.

But… no matter how ugly, stinking, unpleasant and wolfing goats may be, they do not deserve to be treated as they used to be in Manganeses de la Polvorosa – a charming little town in Old Castile, the pompousness of whose name is only surpassed by the imbecility of the locals’ character. To put it in a nut shell: every years during the village festivities of St Vincent, the most Christian brotherhood of the local church tossed a live goat off the bell tower, to the applause of the congregated village plebeians below. The idea was to catch the animal in a life net, held up fireman-style between a number of village toughs; but as all participants were inevitably stoned drunk, this often went a little wrong… which only increased the fun, of course!

Needless to say, the European Union, which bravely stands up for all the oppressed in the world (human, animal, plant or mineral), which has Commissions to battle every Global Injustice from the racial discrimination of chess pieces to the human rights of deformed cucumbers, never did anything against such village feast practices, because, you see, such goings on are Art, High Culture and Valuable Folkloric Tradition; and as such the rights of animal abusers in half the European nations are protected in and under the admirable European Constitution. It took the courage of a local mayor to forbid – in 2002! - this yearly pass time of drunk boors and juveniles, and to replace the breathing victim with a giant stuffed teddy bear.

Unfortunately, local mayors of such courage are few and far between in Spain. Provincial governments are too busy robbing the till or running from prosecution to be overly concerned with innocent fiesta fun. And the central government – be they left wing or right wing, it makes no difference – deeply loves and believes in regional folkloric traditions and would never lift a finger in the name of civilisation.

And so – while the goat no longer drops in Manganeses – Spain is still home to hundreds upon hundreds of crude, cruel, distasteful, sadistic and brutish fiesta practices that nobody cares to do anything about.

Ah, and they say that goats stink…!

AnimAl B. Mittington

PS: I am planning to compose a list of cities, towns and villages that continue in their barbarous fiesta ways, so that people of true Taste, Sophistication, and Culture may shun those spots on their holidays and not throw good money after bad habits. Suggestions from my readers are, naturally, welcome.

War over Gibraltar

Old habits, dear reader, die hard, especially when they are convenient.

Today, Spain is in a spot of trouble – shameless general corruption that runs from the royal house to every politician of the ruling party and all the members of the socialist opposition, skyrocketing national debt, immense unemployment, lethal train accidents caused by stupidity, a 40-year scandal of newborn babies robbed from their mothers and sold by nuns and doctors, and a sickening, life-sentenced paedophile liberated from a Rabat jail by the merciful King of Morocco on the request of the concerned King of Spain and helped rapidly out of the country by, it seems, the Spanish Secret Service - and so, to solve these minor problems quickly and efficiently, the Government of Spain has decided to declare war on Gibraltar.

Good old generalissimo Franco used the same trick to divert attention from hunger, political upheaval, protests and the corruption of his immediate family and friends. In Spain it always works.

What can a civilised man like myself possibly say when such a very cheap trick is pulled out of Madrid’s magician’s hat? Why, nothing really. The second rate demagoguery is so very transparent that no further comment of mine could help any reader’s misunderstnadings. But it is a good occasion to republish my unsurpassed 1992 essay on the hilarious subject. For your fun and your enlightenment, dear reader. So enjoy:

 Phoenicians Go Home !!!

By Alfred B. Mittington

One of the more hilarious spectacles I know in the theatre of International Diplomacy, is to hear a Spanish Foreign Minister discourse upon foreign enclaves planted on national soils. Or, to put it simpler: on how Spain wants Gibraltar back, today rather than tomorrow. It is a marvellous exercise in geopolitical acrobatics. As long as the poor sod is preaching for his own parish, all goes splendidly well. He simply draws a deep breath, inflates his most cavalieresque chest and shouts: ‘IT’S OURS!’ Next thing you know, the whole Spanish congregation jumps to its feet and bursts out in massive applause, most reminiscent of Sieg Heil! and the kind of thing you hear when the Argentinian National Soccer Team scores a point against Lichtenstein.

So far so good. Everybody happy.

But unfortunately, now and again, His Excellency gets invited to comment upon the matter in, say, an interview with Newsweek, or during a live session before BBC cameras. And then things soon turn ugly for the poor fellow; because he’ll be called upon to formulate a principle by which a colonial enclave like Gibraltar belongs rightfully to the mainland nation to which it hangs on for dear life, in this case the Kingdom of Spain. Not so complicated, you say? Well, considerably more so than you imagine. Because His Poor Excellency has a major dilemma. Or still better said: he has two major dilemma’s. You see: on the opposite shore of the Gibraltar Straights, on the coast of what is, for all to see, the Sovereign and Independent Kingdom of Morocco, rise two medium-sized little towns, one called Ceuta, the other Melilla. And guess who owns those??

            Why, yes, you guessed it! They belong to Spain.

            And here’s the rub: Spain wants Gibraltar back. But it balks at the thought of giving up Ceuta and Melilla. And so, to your immense entertainment, you will hear His Iberian Excellency proclaim, in one fine sentence and a single breath: ‘Gibraltar is Ours but the sovereignty of Spain over Ceuta and Melilla is incuestionable y indebatible’. Read: we’re not even going to discuss it! Alas for His Excellency, there is no bleeding way that anybody in the world could formulate an allotting principle for foreign enclaves on national soils, which will return Gibraltar to Spain, yet at the same time will allow Madrid to hold on to Ceuta and Melilla.

            Try for yourself.

Criterion: ‘Gibraltar is part of the Territorial Integrity of Spain’. Well, this is an easy one, ain’t it? Sure, Gibraltar is on the Spanish coast. But Ceuta and Melilla are plainly on the coast of Morocco as well. So if Territorial Integrity is really what decides it all, then you win one and you lose two. (And that’s not even mentioning the tiny complication that, for instance, the Republic of Portugal is also undeniably on the coast of Spain. I mean: where do you draw the line?? Better not introduce that there principle in the United Nations Charter, I say!)

            Another one: ‘English Gibraltar is the fruit of conquest in war.’ Oops. True enough. And modern times might do well to repair such nasty little anomalies from the past… Only: Ceuta and Melilla are also the fruit of Spanish conquest in the distant past (how else do you get such places?) And what counts for one odd colony counts for another, right??

            Okay, a third try: ‘The people of Ceuta and Melilla deeply wish to remain Spanish’. I have no doubt about it. But the people of the Rock want nothing better than to remain as Limey as they can; and then from that pleasant extra-territorial position serve Spain at their best by smuggling drugs into the country and by offering a safe haven for Spanish black money. So if popular sentiment has any say in the matter… 

            We won’t go through the whole arsenal of muddy formulations of principle. All of them are equally valid or nonsensical; but in all cases, to get what you want and keep what you shouldn’t, you’ll have to apply them in one case and ignore them blatantly in the carbon-copy other. No way around that. It works out the same with every single criterion you may invent.

            There is, however, one such formulation which I find particularly amusing, because of the astounding consequences it might have if generally applied. That criterion goes as follows: ‘Gibraltar was conquered by force, but we Spaniards founded Ceuta and Melilla. Therefore Gibraltar still belongs to us, and Ceuta and Melilla belong to…. Us!’

            Now HERE is an interesting variation which might just work! Too bad it is not all the way true. Melilla indeed seems to have been founded by Spanish colonists, on a jutting chunk of useless rock where only a few goats were grazing. But Ceuta was, unfortunately, already in existence when the Spaniards took it over, and so, if strictly applied, Spain might get its Gibraltar and keep its Melilla, but it would fairly be called upon to yield Ceuta to Morocco. Perhaps perhaps perhaps, Their Hispanic Majesties and the Dons who run the show in Madrid would be willing to strike such a neat deal…. But barely would the ink be dry under the pertaining Triangular Treaty of Renunciation, than Spain would find itself in an awful, nay: a horrid fix again. Because, you see, the day after the various take-overs and the feisty lowering and hauling up of the different flags had been performed, Morocco would file a formal complaint with the United Nations, claiming, under the newly formulated Principle of the Return of Foreign Founded Enclaves in the UN Charter, the return to the Kingdom of Morocco of the city of…. Gibraltar!!

            And… Oh Dear!!... They would get it!! Because you see: it just so happens that the city of Gibraltar was founded, back in 711 A.D., by a Berber gentleman called General Tariq, who landed at the rock with his army to conquer Spain, burned his boats behind him, founded the city and even called it after himself (Djebel al-Tariq, the “Rock of Tariq”). No way around that, señor Ministro! Tariq was a Moroccan. So a Moroccan founded the city. So the city belongs by International Right to the Alaouite Kingdom.

            Panic breaks out in Madrid; Rabat delivers a threatening Diplomatic Note; NATO declares non-intervention, but Britain, the only one who lost but never gained in the whole darn operation, gleefully comes out on the side of ‘legitimacy’ and shores up Morocco’s claim in the General Assembly; gunboats draw up before Algeciras; Andorra declares it will stand by its ally and sends troops to Andalusia; and with that heartening sign of international support, Spain mobilises….

You can guess the rest, dear reader: bloodshed, mayhem and Bring the Boys Home Before Christmas.  

            The trouble is that Spain simply has no choice but go to war. Even if she were willing to admit she blundered badly by proposing the Principle of the Return of Foreign Founded Enclaves for inclusion into the UN Charter, and were graciously to yield Gibraltar to Morocco, that would only be the beginning of her urban dismemberment! For not a few cities big and small in Spain have been founded and settled and built by foreign nations!

            Italy, for instance, would be sure to put in an immediate claim for such urban pearls, originally founded by the Romans, as Saragossa (‘Caesar Augustus’), Merida, Lugo, Seville and Santiago de Compostela. No sooner does the UN comply with these demands, then further claims are put forth by the Berlusconi government (Il Condottieri was never a man to let a good occasion slip by without taking advantage!) Cologne, Lyon, Utrecht, Mainz, Bordeaux, every English city that ends in –chester and yes, even London itself would soon fly the Italian tri-colour. Bliss and celebration in the Italian capital are, however, of short duration… For it turns out that the city of Rome itself really belongs to Turkey! After all: it was founded, as every reader of Virgil knows, by Prince Aeneas, who fled from Troy with his pappa on his back and sonny-boy at his elbow, and Troy is Turkish! Are the Turks happy? Well, no longer than an instant! For Greece, dispised, feared, much-maligned Greece, immediately occupies Istanbul, founded, they maintain, by the Greek-Roman Emperor Constantine. Macedonian troops, meanwhile – oh no, I’m sorry: troops of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Blimey and Parblue!) – disembark in Alexandria in Egypt, and in every other of the roughly 24 Alexandria’s which were founded, all over the Middle East and Western Asia, by the great youthful conqueror of the 4^th Century B.C. The Netherlands get New York, Cape Town, Jakarta, Sao Paolo and a coastal village in Japan. The French take New Orleans and Quebec. Dublin devolves on the Danes. The Portuguese move into Mombassa. Hong Kong, just duly returned to mainland China, is once again handed back to England. Jericho declares itself an Independent Canaanite People’s Republic… And so on and so forth. The Principle of the Return of Foreign Founded Enclaves wrecks havoc on the world map, on peaceful foreign relations, and on the Nation State as we know it.

            And do you know who benefits most?

            Oh, you’ll never guess it. You’re really gonna stound!

            Lebanon, of all places.

Lebanon, which at present has barely a city to speak of (why, even Beirut seems to be more of a Syrian Colony than the capital of the land!) Lebanon, from which, in days gone by, those travel-happy Phoenicians sailed their triremes. This little land, which so far only had cedar trees, hashish and rocket throwers to its name, will come out a mighty winner in this game of urban musical chairs, for the Phoenicians had this happy habit of sailing far away and then, when they got tired of rowing, to settle down and start a city. And what really was little more than a rather silly little hobby of B.C.E. times, now pays off prettily. What will they not get?! Tunis will be theirs. Barcelona, Carthagena, Cadiz, Astorga and Lisbon, Marseille perhaps, Palermo for sure, Thebes in Greece undoubtedly. They may make a claim on an English and Irish city here and there. They are sure to get an African capital or two if we may believe Herodotus about the expedition of Pharaoh Necho. They take – there is no question of it – Larache, Salé and Casablanca from Morocco. And go deep enough into mythology and ancient travelogues, and you can be sure they have inalienable rights to some metropolis in the good old US of A. Not bad for a place that yesterday only grew plywood, right? And the most beautiful bit of it is that they, exceptionally, are entitled to keep all their own cities, because Tyrus, Byblos and Sidon were all genuine Phoenician towns from the very first!  

            Let Spain have its way, and a new Superpower will be born: the United City-states of Phoenicia.

            Or, alternatively, I propose we just leave Gibraltar to the Gibraltareños, Ceuta and Melilla to the Spaniards, and the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs to the applause of his chauvinistic sports-palace audience. Everybody will be much happier that way, and comiendo perdices until the end of time!

  

Tangiers, December 1991

P.S. Oh dear! There is always one in every tour-group! No sooner had I published this fine exposé, than a learned gent whose name I only remember as Prof. Dr. Habib Al-Macaroni, Fulbright lecturer at the Beirut American University if I’m not mistaken, hurried to correct my facts in undiluted academic manner (regular readers of my writings know what I think of undiluted academic manners!) Ceuta and Melilla, he takes great pains and costly postage to point out, were not founded by the Spanish at all, but also by the Carthaginians (i.e. late Phoenicians), back in the days when you could do such things without a licence. Thank you so much, Doctor Habib! Your exquisite correction strips absolutely nothing from my Q.E.D., right? It adds to it, you oaf! With readers like that, who needs editors!? 

[Note from the editor: The above article appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique on 2 January 1992. Against expectations, the Spanish Foreign Ministry declared it had no comment. The Moroccan government asked for details]