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.

Going Benalup: Unemployment and easy credit (22 November)

There is a town in the province of Cádiz in Andalusia that has the worst unemployment rate in Europe. It is called Benalup (or Benalup-Casas Viejas, to give it its full name). In an article by Giles Tremlett in “The Observer” on Sunday, the collapse of what, for a brief time, had become a boom town is chronicled, and the story of Benalup tells you mostly all you need to know about why Spain is in such a mess and is going to have one hell of a struggle getting out of it.

Benalup is by no means unique, even if it can lay claim to that unwanted unemployment crown. Spain is full of Benalups, and Mallorca shares its problems. To summarise Tremlett’s main points, the Benalup belly-up effect was founded on excessive credit and on a glut of construction jobs that paid well and took teenagers out of education.

It won’t sit well with the La Caixa bank, known also for its Obra Social good works programmes, that it gets fingered as having triggered a lending war among the banks that flooded into the town in search of mortgage customers, many of them young and having turned their backs on school in the knowledge that they could earn handsome wages in the construction industry.

Construction was the first and most obvious victim of economic crisis, and it took its labour force down with it. In Benalup, those who had left school at sixteen and who had embarked on a side career of avaricious material grab are just part of the almost 50% of Spain’s under-25s that are unemployed. This material grab has left Benalup, as Tremlett remarks, “plastered with ‘for sale’ signs”, those of La Caixa’s estate-agency arm, which has been forced to repossess.

Much of the construction was centred on the coastal area. The Benalup story, therefore, is a not unfamiliar one of the two heads of construction and tourism that is the economy of much of Spain, Mallorca included. But Benalup, some kilometres inland, doesn’t have the luxury of the fallback position of tourism. Without the construction on the coast, it doesn’t really have anything.

The dependence on construction and tourism in different parts of Spain is just one factor that has undermined Spain’s economy. Subject to the vagaries of economic cycles, both industries also contribute to a devaluing of the general skills base and of the education system. Easy money can be had, or could, and the state would provide some assistance in the winter for those less inclined to slog around a building site.

The education system is not that great anyway, and in Mallorca it is particularly poor. But through a combination of the system’s inadequacies, a lack of incentive to stay in education and the promise of riches from humping bricks about (now gone), general competitiveness is also undermined.

One solution to the unemployment in Benalup is a state­-funded training course, assuming you can get on it. Not that it necessarily opens up subsequent employment opportunities, as the course is for graphic design. In Mallorca, there are any number of young graphic designers. They are two a penny. Many are good, but where’s the work? Economies do not generate wealth or growth through graphic design. It is a pitiable non-­solution.

The Zapatero administration presided over the end-game of the great Spanish boom. It deserves to be criticised, but it is not alone. Successive governments have perpetuated an aspirational dream for a country that was in the economic dark ages only half a century ago. One mistake, aided by the banks, was to break with a traditional cash­-based society and replace it with one based on credit, and very easy and loose credit at that. The country’s richness, as evident from a lofty position in the IMF GDP league table, obscures a reality of over­dependence on certain industries and a lack of competitiveness.

There is fortunately some realism coming from the newly elected government, an acceptance that Spain isn’t that rich and that the mechanisms for granting the population the trappings of aspirational wealth were largely built on sand. Within a framework of this new realism, how, though, can Rajoy set about realising his election promises, such as that to reduce unemployment?

I’ll have a look at that in a further article. But for now, and notwithstanding the fact that the Spanish electorate does appear to “get it” where the country’s parlous position is concerned, I’ll leave you with a piece of history. In 1933, Benalup was the centre of an anarchist uprising and a police massacre. Thank God it’s not 1933.

The original “Observer” article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/20/spain-benalup-unemployment-euro-crisis

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.

Reflections Of … (19 November)

“The way life used to be.” Ah, those were the days. Diana Ross and the Supremes and all that 1960s malarkey. Happy times. Not that back in the ’60s they had to worry too much in Mallorca or Spain about having a day off for reflection prior to an election. Old Franco knew a thing or two. In addition to being a dictator, he reckoned the Spanish population was either too thick or too apathetic to bother with things like democracy and voting.

If they were apathetic then, they still are today, if predictions as to abstentions in tomorrow’s elections are anything to go by. But, I should hush my mouth. I’m not meant to talk about the elections today, as today is the day of reflection. Well, sort of. What is really means is that campaigning cannot take place, but there are certain limits also as to what can be said journalistically. Theoretically, no one is meant to pronounce on the day of reflection one way or the other or to be seen to be somehow influencing voting.

I don’t for one moment imagine that anyone would be the slightest bit influenced by what I might or might not say on this blog when it comes to the elections, and that’s for the simple reason that I imagine no one who reads it is in fact entitled to vote. But, as one is meant to remain silent on such matters, I shall do, which is why an article that I had written for today will be held over until tomorrow – it has to do with technocrats, but with a particularly Spanish angle; I’m sure you can’t wait.

The day of reflection is reasonably well adhered to. Spanish TV was following yesterday’s campaigning until the very last moment, just before midnight, and then promptly put on a ridiculous Jean-Claude Van Damme film; time for bed. The press today does report the campaigning but stops short of editorialising.

I know that had I editorialised and sent something off for today’s “Bulletin”, it wouldn’t have been included. Fair enough. But I wonder why, therefore, there is a different column in which there are references to the election. I won’t, for fear of the day of reflection police coming down on me, repeat what was said, but I fancy – know for sure – that had I written such things for today’s paper, they wouldn’t have gone in.

I suspect I know the reason why this other column was acceptable, and that’s probably because had the “offending” part of it had to be removed there would have been a ruddy great white space. Or maybe it wasn’t paid overly much attention to.

It is revealing that certain of my articles get vetoed by the paper. A recent one about Lidl was. I don’t think it was critical; in fact I’m sure it wasn’t. But no, too sensitive; might upset the commercial department. And too sensitive was one about the Bishop of Mallorca. Way too controversial and likely to offend staunch Catholics. There have been others. I am compiling a list of off-limits subjects.

There are tensions between editorial and marketing/sales. They occur in all areas of the media to differing degrees, but there is, or appears to me, a hyper-sensitivity locally. And this isn’t solely down to tensions caused by commercial realities. There really are only two subjects that are off-limits in terms of expressing criticism or disrespect, and those are the royal family (quite unlike Britain therefore) and the Guardia. But a certain censorship does apply, as in, for instance, why the former employment of a particular local mayor is never spelt out. You do wonder why.

There is too much sensitivity and it occurs at what is seemingly the most trivial levels. One only needs to go back to the fuss that the “John Nelson” column in “Talk Of The North” caused to know how something written without any apparent wish to offend can be blown completely out of proportion.

The local communities and indeed the island are small, so there is a perhaps not unreasonable restraint shown, but this hyper-sensitivity does also place a restraint on vibrant and at times important discourse. The day of reflection is a rather different case, but it is nevertheless indicative of an understated tendency to censorship or self-censorship that has never been quite forgotten from the days of when Diana Ross was topping the charts.

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 Gift Horse: The Euro crisis

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. The advice has endured for many centuries. Far more recent is the advice to the Greeks to beware of Europeans bearing gifts, such as that which slashes what they owe by 50%. The Greeks, though, know a thing or two about deceptive gifts. They invented them. Or it. The European Trojan Horse that the Greeks are expected to admit into their walls comes stuffed with an army-load of more austerity. Ingrates they may be, sending the markets back into further turmoil, but when presented with a dubious gift, they do the only sensible thing – and that’s to call a referendum.

When the Greeks say no and send the Trojan Horse packing, they’ll be waving it goodbye from a dock side in Piraeus with banners proclaiming the default it was meant to avoid and their fond adieus to the Eurozone. Why bother waiting? Let them default now and get on with it.

Of course there is another way of looking at it. The referendum ruse is a way of extracting more gifts. 50%? Why not make it 25%? Or one can also see it as the Greeks wanting to get a bit of pride back. They have spent the last few months being portrayed as tax-swindling, idle ne’er-do-wells and now have to put up with Sarkozy saying that they made their numbers up on the back of a fag packet after a good night on the retsina.

Well, they probably did make up their numbers, pre-Euro admission, but then most European countries have played fast and loose to different degrees with “the rules”. The French, for example.

In the days – when were they, as they seem like centuries ago – when Gordon Brown was arriving at his tests for the UK’s entry into Euroland, a key measure was the ability to comply with the stability pact, the one that the French (and the Germans) regularly flouted. In fact, everyone did with the probable exception of the powerhouse that is Luxembourg.

Anyway, let’s not worry too much about who made up what figures, more pressing is what happens when Greece goes totally belly-up, as in Papandreou loses the referendum, Greece exits the euro, total chaos ensues and hyperinflation takes over with the printers pumping out so many notes that it will require pantechnicons to carry the money and not the wheelbarrows of the Weimar Republic.

Hmm, ah yes, Weimar Republic, economic and political chaos, hyperinflation. The Germans should know all about what follows from such circumstances. Indeed the Greeks should have a shrewd idea what can happen as well.

But then it is only Greece. Except of course it isn’t. There is always, well, Spain for instance. So just hypothesise for a moment. Poor old Mariano Rajoy, some time into his tenure as prime minister, finds himself in dire need of a bail-out, Europe comes along bearing gifts (assuming any of the trillion or so is left or the Chinese keep pumping money in) and effectively takes over the government, which, more or less, is what would happen in Greece. Referendum follows. Chaos ensues.

Leaving the Eurozone doesn’t mean leaving the European Union, but much would depend on how the political chaos is handled. The Greeks, and the Spanish, have, when all said and done, some form. It wouldn’t be a case of choosing to leave the European Union but of possibly being booted out. Idiotic concerns about having an identity residence card or not would be supplanted by rather different concerns.

The Spanish hypothesis might remain just that – an hypothesis. Much though a Greek no could create the long-anticipated domino effect that brings Spain to its financial knees, the possibility exists that Europe would still support Greece. It is also just possible that the Greeks would vote yes. Faced with more European-imposed austerity or leaving the Eurozone, they may decide to err in favour of the Euro.

Much might rest, however, on what voices come to the fore in the meantime. As this is as much a political as it is an economic issue, chuck some highly populist mouthpiece into the equation, one that damns Europe and anyone or anything else, and who knows what might happen. This might be the worry, either before or after a Greek referendum, and so it might also be for other countries, Spain included.

Whither the European Odyssey now? Who can predict with certainty, just as who could have predicted how the journey would unfold before the adventure was embarked upon. Whether the Greeks prefer to look a gift horse in the mouth will depend upon what they understand by “gift”. In German the word means poison.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Most Efficacious In Every Case

You know that Christmas is on its way when the dicky bows and tiaras are dragged out of the wardrobe for annual awards ceremonies and the embarrassing thank-you speeches are written and even more embarrassingly delivered. And when Darren Clarke wins Sports Personality, there will be the inevitable, personal-tragedy backstory, delivered by Sue Barker in perfect, sombre-cum-celebratory tones. You don’t need to watch, I can write the script for you now.

Spain has its own awards, among them the Prince of Asturias ones, handed out by Crown-Prince Felipe to worthies of  the arts, sciences, sports and whatever. Leonard Cohen won the prize for literature this year; Haile Gebrselassie added the sports prize to his marathon and track titles.

Rather less grand are the prizes for “Eficacia en Comunicación Comercial”, basically prizes for coming up with good adverts. At the “big night for efficacy” (not exactly a slogan that trips off the tongue), prize winners ranged from Coca-Cola and IKEA to the Archdiocese of Madrid and the town hall of A Coruña. There was not a whole load for Mallorca to celebrate, except for the bronze award in the “regional/local” category that went to Barceló Hotels & Resorts, beaten into third place by the publicity for A Coruña and its cleaning and waste services provider CESPA.

I don’t know what it was that elevated the Galician city to such lofty heights in terms of advertising efficacy, but it doesn’t matter anyway. Far more interesting is the fact that the award is a tad embarrassing. Workers from CESPA have recently gone to the town hall to denounce the company for a breach of employment conditions. Furthermore, back in July, five of the company’s trucks had their tyres slashed. To this you can add the fact that the plant (operated by a different company) that treats waste collected by CESPA was in the midst of an indefinite strike at the time of the truck vandalism. Which all goes to show, I suppose, that efficacy of an advertising campaign is not the same as PR, and CESPA has been accused, in addition to its worker and truck problems, of providing a deficient service.

No such embarrassments existed for Barceló. Members of staff beamed for the cameras in front of the “big night” poster, happy in the knowledge that Barceló had become the first Mallorcan hotel chain to be honoured for its efficaciousness.

What secured the bronze gong for Barceló was a campaign called “SuperSummer Azul”. Brainchild of a Mallorcan agency called The Atomic Idea, it borrowed from a TV comedy show “Verano Azul” that aired thirty years ago and featured one of the actors, then an eleven-year-old and now most definitely not. Miguel Ángel Valero has a touch of the Ray Winstones about him but with less Cockney.

Valero’s an extraordinary bloke. He turned his back on acting and became a telecommunications engineer and academic, penning the snappily-entitled thesis “model of the provision of interactive services for telemedicine in the home via broadband networks”. Most efficacious in every case. He invented telemedicinal compound.

What is significant about the award for Barceló is not so much that it won an award but that it is promoting itself. The campaign was for Spanish television and clearly wouldn’t work elsewhere as no one would have a clue as to the association or who Valeró was. But it marks a distinct shift in emphasis in tourism marketing.

Hotels have previously left promotion to others – to tour operators and to travel agencies – but now they are going direct. Iberostar has been doing this, as with its advertising via the BBC website. At the recent ABTA convention, it was made clear that hotels were becoming more active and direct in their promotions.

This is important because the chains with the financial and global clout, such as Barceló and Iberostar, are seeking to make themselves recognisable brands, and what this means is that they wish to attract a loyal customer base that opts for a Barceló or an Iberostar hotel and therefore holiday, regardless of location. As the brand takes over in the minds of the consuming tourist, the specific destination, for example Mallorca, becomes secondary.

It is potentially a most efficacious strategy for the likes of Barceló, but not necessarily for Mallorca, as hotel chains that became global on the back of the island’s home market seek customers for their resorts many miles away from Mallorca. So maybe the island should grab for itself the “most efficacious in every case” line. It does, after all, have many a medicinal compound: “drink a drink a drink…”.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Bishop, The Politicians And The Gays

If you fancy being a bishop, then having a Christian name of Jesús is probably no great disadvantage. And so it is with the Bishop of Mallorca, Jesús Murgui. But neither his status as bishop nor his Christological appellation absolve him from criticism; he gets it in not inconsiderable amounts.

Jesús Murgui became bishop in 2004, succeeding Teodor Úbeda, who had been Mallorca’s bishop for 30 years and who had cultivated a reputation for being progressive. It is a reputation that Monseñor Murgui appears not to share. He is said to be a confederate of the archbishops of Madrid and Barcelona and formerly of the late archbishop of Valencia (Agustín García-Gasco who died in May); these three archbishops have been described as the most reactionary and conservative in the Spanish church.

Monseñor Murgui has another type of reputation, a less than wonderful one among the local Spanish media and also among his own priests.

When the press claims that a typical reaction towards the bishop among Mallorcan clergy is one of sarcasm, this may well serve the press’s agenda. Sections of the media are suspicious of him, to the point of being antagonistic. And partly, this is because he never speaks to them. In his seven years as bishop, he has given not one interview to the press. Where his reticence is excused, it is not on the grounds of shyness, but on a wish to avoid getting too political.

The problem for the bishop, though, is that, despite his reluctance to engage with the media, his views are known and they are political (in the current social climate of Spain), while he represents an institution, the Catholic Church, which is anything but indifferent to politics.

The First Estate of the Catholic Church is heavily politicised and seeks to influence the political process, and this is especially so in Spain, despite Roman Catholicism having been abandoned as the official religion and despite also a dramatic fall in church-going. It is this seeking of influence that makes the Fourth Estate of the press so ready to leap onto what emanates from the Church. And much has been emanating, much that will be espoused from pulpits this weekend.

The Spanish Episcopal Conference, its president is Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela, the Archbishop of Madrid, has recently met. As is customary prior to a national election, it has had something to say for itself, as has Monseñor Murgui. There is little difference between the sentiments of the Conference and those of the bishop, which are being shared with the faithful, three weeks or so before the election.

It will come as no surprise that the bishop is not exactly supportive of issues such as abortion and gay marriage, but what has really stirred things up is that his letter, due to be read out in churches on the island, points to the “danger” of voting for politicians who support gay marriage and to “impositions” by the State. By politicians, he really means political parties, and by implication he lends his support firmly to one party – the Partido Popular.

The PP doesn’t need the Church’s support to win the election. Though as a party it is identified closely with the Church, it would probably prefer that the bishop, and the Episcopal Conference, in fact kept quiet. Social issues are unlikely to be prominent at hustings for an election that is all about Spain’s economy, but they may not be overlooked by much of an electorate which, dissatisfied with PSOE’s handling of the economy, has nevertheless broadly agreed with its social policies and with its attitude towards the Church.

For example, an investigation last year by the Mallorcan research organisation Gadeso into religious attitudes found that a majority between the ages of 16 and 59 supported gay marriage. A surprisingly high 35% of those over the age of 60 also supported it. The Church is out of step with social attitudes, just as it has become increasingly out of step with society as a whole and offers waning influence.

One suspects, however, that it sees the election of a PP government as a chance to grab back some influence, hence its pronouncements ahead of the election. For the PP though, it would be a huge mistake if it were to try and turn the clock back. There are unquestionably elements within the PP who would want to do just that, and there is always the suspicion that lurking somewhere in its background is the influence of the mysterious Opus Dei. But as a government it will have enough on its plate without seeking to send Spain back to a reactionary age.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.