Mariano And The Mess (23 November)

Who on earth would want to be a Spanish prime minister? Well, Mariano Rajoy for one, though why is anyone’s guess. It says much for political ambition that you would willingly enter the lions’ den unprotected and smelling of dinner. Deficit, highest unemployment rate in Europe, virtually no growth. Presumably, in the words of the election song of a certain former prime minister, things can only get better. Actually, they can’t; they can only get worse, and they already have.

Surprise has been expressed that the markets have reacted with a massive thumbs-down. That’s not how it’s meant to work. Good, right-wing, slash-and-burn politico takes over, and the markets are supposed to cheer at the fall of the squandering, bumbling incompetents from the left. They might have done were it not for the fact that Rajoy has to wait a few weeks before getting his backside onto the prime ministerial seat. There are procedures, you know, post-electoral ones, and the markets are being blamed for not understanding that it takes weeks for the Spanish to sort these procedures out. Perhaps Spanish politicians should try understanding how markets work, though they have shown little evidence that they do.

The hiatus following the election is just one reason why the markets have reacted so negatively. Another is that they really don’t have much confidence in Rajoy and the Partido Popular as they know full well that there is precious little that Rajoy can actually do. Yep, it’s a great time to be taking over as prime minister, knowing that you are totally emasculated and are dead meat even before you start.

If he were allowed into the prime ministerial office now, he would be flashing into the night sky over the Gotham City of Spain the distress image of the Euro and getting Angela and Nicolas racing from the ECB Batcave. “There are only 24 hours to save Spain, Robin.” Which isn’t too far from the truth, as each day brings with it ever more woe. Or perhaps he would be sending out an SOS and hoping that Thunderbird 5 picks it up. “Brains, any ideas as to how we can rescue Spain?” “Er, er, well, er, Mr. Tracy, we’ll have to dig very deep. Cut very deep.” “Right, Brains. Virgil, take Thunderbird 2’s austerity mole pod.” “F.A.B., father.”

Oh that it was as simple as sending out a distress signal and International Rescue comes and makes everything all right. What am I saying? This is pretty much how it is. The IMF or the European Central Bank buying up Spanish debt as quickly as it can be issued in order to give Rajoy some breathing space to stutter his words of reforms before they cart him off to the Papandreou Home For Distressed European Leaders.

There’s the deficit and then there’s employment creation. It’s not going to happen, because JP Morgan says so. Yes you can always rely on what banks say – they got everyone into the mess and now they can gloat at everyone’s misfortune; JP Morgan reckons unemployment in Spain will rise to 27% next year. Rajoy, if and when he can get his scissors out, is going to have to cut so deep that unemployment will continue its upward march and growth its downward slump. Here comes another recession. Not that the first one ever really went away.

In an ideal world, and you may have noticed that the world currently isn’t ideal, Rajoy would set in motion much-needed plans to restructure Spain’s economy and not just its finances. Investment in new industries to break the dependence, certainly in some regions of Spain, on construction and tourism has been demanded for years. But where would the investment come from now? Even if the banks weren’t suffering liquidity problems or weren’t applying a squeeze and even if the government had spare pots of cash lying around, the results would take years to bear fruit. And Rajoy hasn’t got years. He’s barely got days.

Some proposals like tax cuts for smaller businesses could help with stimulating the economy, but what really might would be lowering the burden on social security payments. A reduction in IVA for the tourism industry, however, would be senseless. Tax receipts have gone up this year, thanks in part to the rise in IVA, and they are likely to be up again next year.

Rajoy has inherited a God awful mess. He should demand our sympathy, but then he wanted to be prime minister. So he should get on and sort it. But he can’t, not yet, because procedures don’t allow it. Incredible.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Secret Technocrats (20 November)

These are good times to be a technocrat. It is the one job that currently offers good employment prospects, and not any old employment. Not that a technocrat is technically a job. You don’t apply for a position as a technocrat, you become one because someone says you are and because you have whatever the technical ability required at the time might be.

There is something alarming about all the technocrats who, like meerkats looking out for impending economic catastrophe, have been poking their heads up from under university desks and elsewhere. The new European government of Frankfurt has appointed them. In Italy, they have become the Full Monti, a whole puppet government of their own, Angela’s economic angels; Merkel and the Meerkats.

What is alarming is that the mere mention of technocrat has come to be accompanied by a contemptuous spit, the title uttered in the same breath as the names of European leaders most of us would rather forget.

Technocrats are not politicians, but they have fulfilled political functions and have also filled political positions. But strictly speaking, a technocrat has no interest in politics; all that concerns him are the number­-crunching of economics or the plans of production and productivity. Technocrats are of an age that we thought had long gone. They are the political incarnation of the one-­time mass producers; Henry Fords, and each one uniformly the same shade of black.

They are of the old scientific management era before the softer and more humane principles of management kicked in. They are from a dark age and are something of the dark. Stalin did not devise economic and production plans, nor did Hitler and nor did Franco. Technocrats did.

Though not ostensibly political, the technocrats of Europe’s dictatorships would never have got where they did without being as one with the prevailing political philosophy. Technocrats bend to the rules of politics, those set by others, such as the Frankfurt Group, while apparently seeming to make the rules.

As Mariano Rajoy contemplates the trophy that is his, might he just have a concern that he might find himself surplus to requirements? It’s not impossible. There is a difference, though. Greece had a lame­-duck premier and Italy had Berlusconi. Rajoy is neither.

There is also a hint that he might just pre­-empt any technocratically­-driven putsch. Gone largely uncommented upon prior to the election was his statement that he was considering bringing “independent” figures into his government. In itself, this is not unusual. Blair had independents. One of them, a former journo, more or less ran the Labour government. Alastair Campbell wasn’t a technocrat, though, unlike Sir Alan Walters, Thatcher’s own mini­-Milton Friedman. Neither, however, was formally a member of the government.

Independent has become a more acceptable description than technocrat, but technocrats, in a contemporary guise, is what many independents brought into assist governments are. Which brings us to Rajoy, his independents and whoever they might be.

Spain’s economy after the Civil War and before Franco’s death can be divided into two periods: the catastrophic era of post­-war autarky; and the boom from the start of the sixties, inspired in part by the Stabilisation Plan of 1959 and by technocrats who were brought into to oversee the modernisation of the Spanish economy.

The technocrats took much credit for Spain’s transformation, though it has been widely argued that they just got lucky and cashed in on a period of rapid growth in Europe as a whole.

Whether or not the technocrats really were that instrumental in Spain’s subsequent success, they were always sure of Franco’s support, and that is because the technocrats shared a common background: Opus Dei.

The Opus comprised an elite from business and industry and one with the same rigid Catholicism that Franco adhered to. But it is the shadowy nature of Opus Dei, questions as to what influence it may have, its technocratic past and also its potential political links that make Rajoy’s mention of “independents” intriguing at best.

The Partido Popular, transformed as it has been from its unsuccessful origins as a party created by Franco’s former tourism minister (albeit with a different name), has nevertheless failed to totally shake off these origins and all the baggage that goes with them, which includes Opus Dei.

As Rajoy is considering introducing independents to his government and as there are lingering suspicions as to what and who lurks within the recesses of the Partido Popular, he needs to be clear as to who it is he plans to appoint. And as importantly, what associations they might have.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Long Hello And Goodbye (15 November)

In the final week before the national election, no polls can be published; they might distort public opinion, or so the theory goes. Come the final 24 hours before the election, and everyone has to shut up and allow themselves a period of reflection before heading to the polls on Sunday to do the awful deed.

Putting a block on more polls is unnecessary; there hasn’t been a need for polls for months. PSOE’s long goodbye should go into the Guinness Book of Records for the most time it has been known that a political party would lose the next election. And badly.

Nothing has altered the path to the inevitable Partido Popular victory: not a Rubalcaba bounce when Zapatero confirmed that he knew the way the wind was blowing; not a surge of support from the right when PSOE carved up the constitution and committed the deficit requirement to law; not a wave of thanks to PSOE when ETA called it a day.

The eclipse of PSOE on Sunday will be the culmination of the process started by the credit crunch and Zapatero’s attempts to calm a nation’s fears. By saying there was no crisis, he was whistling in the dark; his delusion, a fiddling of inaction while capitalism burned. He responded too slowly, but he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. The game was up as soon as crisis raised its unlovely head. The story would have been the same had the PP been in government – and they know it.

Mariano Rajoy will be the next president of Spain, and president, by title and tradition going back to the nineteenth century, it is; calling him prime minister is in line with how titles normally work in a parliamentary monarchy. Rajoy’s ascendancy has been the long hello, so long in fact it is difficult to understand how he comes to still figure. Beaten by Zapatero in 2008, long dismissed as inadequate by many commentators and even members of his own party, one of them being the former PM José Maria Aznar, it is a mystery what he is doing about to take office.

Rajoy is becoming prime minister (president) by default. He has had to do nothing and say nothing. The prize has been his ever since the flames from Lehman and utterances regarding the previously unheard of subprime market first flickered across dealers’ screens. Prime minister by default and prime minister by superior force and direction. Just as the Balearics Bauzá is a puppet on a long string stretching from PP central office, so Rajoy dances to the tune of his own master. And if Rubalcaba is to be believed, that is Aznar; Aznar who has been contemptuous of his successor and now treats him as the dummy to his ventriloquism.

The electoral slogan for Rajoy is both simple and simplistic. “Súmate al cambio”. Join the change, more or less. When all else fails, and it normally does, politicians bring out the change word. It is the default slogan for a default prime minister; vote for me, I’m not the other lot. But what will Rajoy change? More pain and more austerity are not change; they are more pain and more austerity, and the electorate is heading to the polling stations to vote for masochism.

“Masoquismo” and “machismo”. Macho politics with which to confront the unions and employment conditions. Mariano as Margaret, tackling the enemy within. Change is necessary, but at what cost socially (and industrially), as Thatcher stubbornly ignored. The unions, though, have been but one part of the collusive complacency of Spain’s social capitalism model; they have been a loveably roguish pantomime villain to the Prince Charmings of successive governments of both blue and red who have flaunted the glass slippers of boom-time politics.

It was Zapatero’s misfortune to be the shoemaker who couldn’t repair the slipper. He can be accused of a lack of foresight, but foresight with hindsight is a wonderful thing; he danced to his own tune, as had previous Spanish leaders, one with an exciting boom-boom beat, but he ended up a busted flush and a boom-time rat.

Yet for all this, Zapatero helped to mould a Spain far more at ease with itself. The pain that Rajoy is about to inflict, and it is going to be painful, might just be acceptable, though by no means to all, but if he insists on a change that is a back to the future in terms of cultural, social and religious policies, he may not find the populace so willing to support him.

Come Sunday, the electorate of turkeys will vote for Christmas, and after Sunday, things will change. Just don’t expect them to be very pleasant.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Face To Face (8 November)

Face to face, face off, face up to facts, put a brave face on things, put a face to someone. Idiomatic contortions of “face” just go to emphasise how important the face is.

The face determines much. It determines reaction and impression by others, and it betrays reaction and impression on behalf of the “face” him or herself. Face to face, “cara a cara”, determined much. This was the face off between the Spanish prime ministerial candidates, facing up to the facts that inform the election, or diligently ignoring them, one putting a brave face on things, both being people you could put a face to.

Even if you were already familiar with the faces of Mariano Rajoy and Alfredo Rubalcaba, exposed to the television camera, facing each other across a vast desk, you saw things you hadn’t previously. Rubalcaba looked younger than his Solzhenitsyn appearance suggests, though he seemed to visibly age during his encounter with Rajoy who had seemed to have taken a leaf out of his predecessor Aznar’s book and had formed an acquaintance with hair dye; his beard looked strangely grey against a full head of vibrant brown.

The electoral debate on Spanish television was an event akin to a major football final. The lead-up was endless, a clock in the top right-hand corner giving a countdown to how long it was before the face to face occurred. Analysts there were in abundance, children had been asked as to their choice of next prime minister, campaign leaders of the two camps talked up their boys, the one heading the PSOE campaign standing in front of a legend which read “formularubalcaba”; socialist medicine, one presumed.

Then there were the presenters. Spanish television has taken the message of equality to the extreme. Barely a male was to be seen amidst the great numbers of female presenters. And what strikes one about them is the fact that nearly all are gorgeous. There aren’t many heirs to the throne or Spanish national football team captains and goalkeepers to go around, but a career in television does offer its marital and partner opportunities, though what does one make of the strikingly blonde Maria Casado, whose surname suggests that she already is married?

And so, eventually, to the face to face itself. The moderator wished everyone a good evening, including America, which might not have been glued to television screens as much as he might have hoped; Obama, one imagines, had better things to do than devote a couple of hours to potential leaders of a country that barely registers in the international scheme of things.

Though of course it might register, if the economy goes totally belly-up, and it was this, the economy, that formed the first part of the debate, the rules being set out by our moderator friend, a moustachioed gentleman with a resemblance to Bob Carolgees minus Spit the Dog.

It mattered little what was actually said. Far more important was the watching, the studying of the faces. Here were the two men with the fate of a nation in their hands, and what a choice they offer. The best one might say about either is that he is a safe pair of hands, possibly, but both are terminally dull, terminally bearded and grey, despite the efforts of the make-up people. Spain doesn’t do charisma politics.

They argued occasionally, some heat was given off, dismissiveness of the opponent was shown on the face, but only once was there genuine contempt, Rubalcaba’s glance at Rajoy during the bit on social policies saying all you needed to know. It was all pretty well-mannered and formal. “Señor Rajoy” and “Señor Rubalcaba”; both deployed the “usted” form. Little enlivened proceedings except for when Rubalcaba suddenly produced a graphic during the pensions debate; it was as though he were on a chat show and had remembered that he had a book to promote or as though he were on “Blue Peter” – here’s a graphic I made earlier.

When it came to an end, you were none the wiser. Bob Carolgees signed off events with thanks all round. There was no shaking of hands, no smiles for the camera, just a long, lingering shot of the desk on a stage in front of an absent audience. Frankly, it had all been an enervating experience, but then politics often are, especially when the protagonists are as stripped of vitality as these two.

Rajoy probably won, but then so he should as he went into the face to face in a position of strength, PSOE fast disappearing down the opinion poll plug hole. Rubalcaba’s face will have done little to have reversed the trend.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Tourism Made Simple For Politicians

Amazing. Rajoy speaks! He has left it late, but with just a couple weeks remaining before the general election it is about time that he proved that he hadn’t permanently lost his voice. He has been speaking, and what words of wisdom have been pouring out of the Partido Popular’s prime ministerial candidate. Words of tourism wisdom.

Somewhere in the bowels of PP HQ is a room where candidates are taken to be given their primers on subjects they have no knowledge of, like tourism for instance. Various strategists, PR people and speech-writers sit the candidates down and open the “Juanita y Juan” book of tourism made simple for politicians.

“Right now, Mariano, repeat after me. Quality tourism.” “Quality tourism.” “Good. Do you know what it means?” “Erm …” “Not to worry because it doesn’t mean anything. Now, listen carefully, I will read out a list of things that will overcome seasonality and I want you to then repeat them. Understood?” “Seasonality. Yes, good, it’s a bit of problem for tourism. Isn’t it?” “It is, so it’s very important that you know what you’re talking about. Here goes. Culture, nature, nautical, sport, film, gastronomy, bird-watching and golf.” “Ah, golf! Yes. Seve Ballesteros. Fore!” “Yes, Mariano, unfortunately he is in fact dead.”

Rajoy has certainly been taking his lessons seriously. He has come up with a cunning plan. He’s going to tackle structural problems of the tourism sector, such as there being too many obsolete resorts. Gosh, what an original thought. Where have we heard this before? Ah yes, Playa de Palma. How long has it taken for its redevelopment not to occur? Only about seven years. So far.

What is actually meant by obsolete? Given that Spanish and Mallorcan resorts grew up in the sixties and seventies, it probably means they’re all obsolete. The sort of investment that would be required to make them un-obsolete will mean they remain obsolete for a further 40 or 50 years, by which time they will probably have fallen down anyway.

But then, investment has been available. Or was. Supposedly. Go back to 2008 and you may recall that 500 million euros were going to be pumped into updating tourism resorts. What do you mean, you don’t recall? They most certainly were. Something got in the way, though.

Also back in 2008 there was another little scheme, not a million miles away from what Rajoy has in mind for combating seasonality. Come on, you must remember the Winter in Spain campaign. Nope? Well, you wouldn’t be the only one, as it was quietly forgotten about not long after it was announced. Yet this was all part of the drive to get those high-spending European oldsters beating a winter path to the Balearics and elsewhere; the same European oldsters who will now not be coming this winter because there’s no money to subsidise their trips.

Despite having done his tourism homework, learnt his lines and acquired a status as the new guru of tourism, Rajoy is being pressurised by the tourism industry into giving them back their national tourism minister. There used to be one, the Mallorcan Joan Mesquida, before he got downgraded and became a mere secretary, or whatever it was he became. And he certainly knows a thing or two about tourism. As former finance minister for the Balearics, he was co-author of the eco-tax, that spectacular disaster of tourism PR that was jettisoned when the first Antich administration was turfed out of office.

There again, and as with the non-forthcoming 500 million investment and Winter in Spain campaign, this was all the fault of socialists. Haven’t got a clue when it comes to tourism. Not like Rajoy, good old capitalist right-winger that he is. Mariano’s going to have tourists flocking to Mallorca (and Spain) in winter, looking at birds and tucking into bowls of tumbet. No one’s ever thought of that before. He’s going to change the image of Spain and make it a tourist destination of quality with the quality tourists to match; none of the bloody riff-raff that’s coming in at present on their easyJets.

Yep, tourism has a bright future under Mariano, as he is clearly a quick learner, and he doesn’t always need the strategists to tell him what to say. The environment? No problem. Climate change doesn’t exist, as his cousin told him it didn’t. The economy? Well, he can probably a find a bloke in a pub to tell him how to fix that. And you wonder why, as Wikileaks proved, former premier Aznar has always had his doubts about him.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Battle Of The Beards

Beard is a slang term for a partner who disguises the other partner’s true sexual orientation. Let me say straightaway that I do not suggest for one moment that either Mariano Rajoy or Alfredo Rubalcaba would have a beard (except of course that both of them, in a hair sense, do) and that either is anything other than 100% heterosexual. That said, a touch of gayness might play well with Rubalcaba’s more liberal audience, while it wouldn’t with Rajoy’s conservative constituency.

José Luis Zapatero’s announcement of a November general election ushers forth, earlier than expected, the battle of the beards; the hustings of the hirsute will take place sooner than we had thought.

Zapatero, clean-shaven, will be succeeded by greying facial hair of either the left or right. The good money, at present, is on a right-wing full set, but Rubalcaba could yet take a Gillette to Rajoy, the polls suggesting that he has already started to trim the Partido Popular beard.

With Zapatero’s departure in November, we will lose one of the great comedy characters of European politics. What beckons next for José Luis Bean? A series of “The Thin Blue Line”? Inappropriate perhaps, if only in terms of colour. With his going, we will be deprived of one of the finest lookalikes to ever step onto the world stage, but we could yet get another.

Rubalcaba is a dead ringer for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (in his younger, less beardy days that is). And then there’s his name. Rubal? Ruble? Is there a closet Russian in the PSOE house, an old-time Commie waiting to emerge and lead Spain from its hard-labour Gulag of economic crisis? Or indeed plunge it deeper into crisis?

Unfortunately, we are unlikely to ever know or to ever have the satisfaction of having a former Russian novelist meeting Putin or Medvedev at European leaders’ gatherings. Instead there will be Rajoy, the greyest man of Spanish politics, bereft of charisma and any redeeming comedic features.

But whoever wins the upcoming election will be starting from a position of handicap. Both Rajoy and Rubalcaba can consider themselves already stripped of some support. Why? Because politicians with beards have been shown to poll worse than those without.

Spanish political facial hair has generally been absent since the days of Franco, who sported a sort of Hitler but never a beard. José Maria Aznar brought the moustache back into political fashion, along with hair dye, but Zapatero reverted to the clean-shaven presidential (or prime ministerial, if you prefer) look that had been favoured by Felipe González.

Now, though, the electorate is faced not only by faces with moustaches but those also with beards. It will make for a very difficult choice. On the basis that men with beards cannot be trusted, both may fail to win.

This is not anti-beardism on my behalf but a statement of the fact that politicians with beards don’t go down that well with electorates. And if one considers some of the leading political beards of the generation, you can begin to appreciate why: various Iranian ayatollahs as well as Ahmadineyad, Castro, David Blunkett.

When Europe’s political leaders line up for photos at economic crisis meetings any time after the Spanish elections, there will be one particularly conspicuous leader. Who’s the weird beard, will go the question. All other of Europe’s politicians have engaged the use of the razor. David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel; none of them bearded, or even close to being. Yet, there will be Rajoy (or Rubalcaba) in the glare of the cameras with bits of Euro-leaders’ lunch clinging to the chin. At a time when Moody’s is threatening to downgrade Spain’s credit rating, the last thing Spain needs is a future prime minister who can’t be trusted.

It is the beard factor that makes any prospect of Rajoy turning Spain’s fortunes around to be illusory. The question is, therefore: will he (or Rubalcaba) do the decent thing, in the name of Spanish economic recovery, and have a shave?

But to come back to the beard slang term, there is a definite contrast in style to the two political beards who will be battling it out in November. Rubalcaba’s Solzhenitsyn hints at something vaguely Bohemian and liberal. His beard is in keeping with the social policies that Zapatero has so successfully managed to introduce. It is the beard of a left-wing university lecturer who insists on wearing sandals.

Rajoy’s, on the other hand, is a studious and serious affair, as befits a studious and serious man disinclined to approve of liberal frivolities. It is the beard of a suited management consultant sent in to effect swingeing cuts. Which is exactly what he will do of course.

Bring on November, bring on the beards, and let’s get ready to stubble.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing: the PP

The PP has delivered, thus bringing joy to a British expatriate community assumed to be, but far from exclusively, as tending to the right or a good deal further. Next year the PP will deliver unto Spain a new president, Mariano Rajoy. What, though, really is the PP? This is not an idle question, as it relates to how it is often perceived.

An old university friend of mine has lived in Barcelona since the late 1970s. Fluent in the languages, conversant with the nuances of language and of social and political life in Catalonia and Spain, he has also taught political theory – at La Salle University.

The other day, he asked me what I thought about the blue wave of the PP washing over the Balearics and then went on to give a perspective on the PP and on its treatment by the media. It’s his, but it is not his alone.

Amongst other things, one paragraph stood out. I quote:

“I would take issue with the British press. They constantly describe the PP as a ‘right-of-centre party’, implying that it is some kind of benign, Disraeli, villa Tory outfit, when in reality it is easily the most right-wing mainstream party in Europe.”

This isn’t a simple matter of semantics. Delete “centre”, and “right” on its own takes on a different complexion. A convention of using “centre-right” conforms with how we like to perceive the British Conservative Party, or how it, and most of the press, wishes it to be perceived. Whether the current version is, is a moot point, but within it do not lurk the issues that surround the PP and which are not of the centre.

The PP is a beast of immediate post-Franco times. Though it was founded in 1989, its lineage is clear; back to 1976 and when the Alianza Popular was created by Franco’s former tourism minister. Manuel Fraga was considered a moderate in Franco terms. But all things are relative. The AP struggled for the first few years of its life because it was seen as representative of the old authoritarianism.

The PP still suffers from a hardline image, despite its portrayal as centre-right and despite Rajoy attempting to make himself appear moderate; elements within his party are anything but. It can’t rid itself of its lineage. Indeed, it reinforces it. The neutering of the judge Baltasar Garzón has widely been seen as having been driven by the PP, with the Falange a willing castrator.

While this might all sound as though it is leading towards a paean for PSOE, it isn’t. I can damn PSOE as well as I can the PP. But, although PSOE – Zapatero and Antich – have proven not to be up to the task of tackling economic crisis in Spain or the Balearics, the party has been responsible for a significant shift in social attitudes. It is Zapatero’s one great achievement: one that elements within the PP would wish to reverse and destroy. And Rajoy has not convinced that he would be able to stop them, even were he to wish to.

To this social agenda, one can add the economic one. The Chicago school of slash-and-burn. Milton Friedman et al; Reaganomics, Thatcherism. I can already hear some voices cheering at the prospect. Spain needed and needs a dose of economic realism, but at what cost? And at what cost to Mallorca?

One of the criticisms levelled against José Bauzá is that he is merely an instrument of the bidding of the PP nationally. When Rajoy wins the next general election, a target for the PP will be the autonomous regions, of which the Balearics are one. A compliant PP president in Palma, and the agenda to slash dramatically the regions’ spending, and one advocated by the IMF and others, will be set.

Bauzá, the PP, have enjoyed a good week. They have enjoyed a largely uncritical and non-analytical examination as to what is to come and as to the wolf that hides in the clothing of the sheepish Rajoy, who has been distinctly coy so as not to frighten the flocks of the Spanish electorate. And when the divisions that exist within the PP in Mallorca re-surface, ones related, for example, to the control by the national party and to anti-Catalanism, are grafted onto a national agenda of social illiberalism, the past week might start not to look so good.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Bearded Wonders And Robot Presidents

President Zapatero, he of the many nicknames, is often referred to as ZP. It makes him sound like a micro-chip, which is about right seeing as how he is the first fully automated political leader in western Europe. The ZP has been inserted into his motherboard, so he has now become Z-3PO, waving its arms around and screaming “reformas, reformas, reformas”. The Z-3PO was recently interviewed by the “Financial Times”. In the video, one can see it beaming. The original model always beamed a lot, more in confusion than simple affability. The robotic, automated version, now sensing an end to its political career, is beaming at the prospect of retirement, receiving its ex-presidential salary and writing its memoirs.

There is another reason for all the beaming. Astonishingly enough, Spain is groping its way out of recession, and Zapatero is getting the plaudits. The German “iron lady”, Angela Merkel, has been praising his efforts, thus also bolstering her fellow countrymen who do, after all, either own much of Spain or wish to sell even more of it to even more of these fellow countrymen. When pressed on quite how this miracle of recovery has come to pass, the Z-3PO is plugged in, beams a lot, and goes off on the “reformas” chant that has been programmed into its circuits.

The Z-3PO is driven by an operating system known as “New Labour”. This makes it and the party it heads, the PSOE new model non-ideologues, lean ever further away from any socialist roots. The Z-3PO, fashioned after Tony, smooth-faced, grinning, exaggerated hand movements and any policy it fancies, has taken the party so far towards the centre or in the opposite direction to that which it historically had, that it has been able to more or less tame the ogres of the unions. It may not have been a Scargill or a Clause 4 moment, but the air-traffic controllers’ strike was something of a turning-point. Even the barely reconstructed Commies of the CCOO union disapproved of their action (though admittedly they didn’t much care for the packet that the controllers were receiving.)

Taming the unions and changing labour law are crucial elements to all the “reformas”. And remarkably the unions seem prepared to go along with them, given that they have been cast, for the purposes of public consumption, in the role of pantomime villains, as opposed to those in the banking and finance sectors who should be.

The Z-3PO is quite happy with this. It will be de-commissioned in 2012, which will be something of a pity as it is at least the embodiment, as it were, of a modern political leader: wires and circuit-boards in the right place and increasingly further to the right, a clone of Blair and no facial hair. And this last bit is important.

The leadership of the new model PSOE is likely to pass to one Alfredo Rubalcaba, the beardy vice-president who bears an unnerving resemblance to Solzhenitsyn. He will be up against another beardy, the Partido Popular’s Mariano Rajoy – Mr. Grey – who succeeds in making the normally uncharismatic world of Spanish politics seem positively magnetic. Even the robotic Zapatero is full of life by comparison. What a choice faces Spain. Mr. Grey or the Gulag.

Despite having a massive lead in the polls, the Partido Popular faces a problem. Mr. Grey. We have WikiLeaks to thank for knowing that his predecessor, the little accountant José Maria Aznar, had reservations about Rajoy. A lot of people did, and still do. It seems no coincidence that, at what has been a critical period for Spain, Rajoy has been hardly anywhere to be seen. But Aznar has. He has re-emerged, minus, in proper contemporary manner, his old moustache and with his hair even darker than it became during his time as president, so much so that his head is like a Bertie Bassett’s, with a thick layer of liquorice on top.

The re-appearance of the lush Aznar barnet is a reminder of a time when a Spanish leader did command some international kudos. Zapatero has just about managed to acquire some of his own. He may have performed an almost complete about-turn on most things, except his praiseworthy and liberal social reforms, but he seems to be restoring some Spanish credibility. It may have all required him being re-programmed, but he has retained, amidst all the “reformas”, an affability. It is not one that could be said to be shared by Rajoy, the likely next president, a zomboid, and bearded, Borg.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.