😷 This Week in Spain: New Year, New Drama

We're back! And so are face masks and political bickering.

Jan 11, 2024

By @IanMount and @AdrianBono | January 11, 2024 | Madrid | Issue #39

🎉 Welcome to The Tapa, an English-language, weekly newsletter about all things Spain!

🥜 This ~~Month~~ Week in a Nutshell: Welcome back! We hope you enjoyed the holidays. We did—and learned some lessons. Like, never, ever fly TAP Portugal. But that’s for another day.

We’re only eleven days into 2024 and it’s already a dumpster fire of a year. This coalition government is looking like it’s going to be an absolute nightmare, face masks are making a (partial) comeback, we’re already dealing with an environmental disaster and once again we made the international news thanks to the use of blackface during the Reyes parade.

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Off to a rocky start

The Crisis Over the ‘Anti-crisis’ Decrees, Explained

Parliament is back in action this week and it’s already a roller coaster of emotions that on Wednesday ended with the 11th-hour rescue, by Catalan separatist party Junts, of two of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s decrees, and the tanking of another decree that was a) spearheaded by Sumar and b) killed when Podemos voted against it—thus marking the beginning of a full blown war between the former lefty allies.

First, a quick recap of the state of play right before the holidays (in case ya forgot!):

Self-exiled Junts-leader Carles Puigdemont warned Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez that letting “opportunities” pass would lead to “unpleasant consequences”. In other words, give me what I want or your government is in trouble.
Far-left Podemos broke with Yolanda Díaz’s leftist coalition Sumar and joined the mixed group in Parliament (the uncool kids club) after complaining that Díaz wasn’t listening to them.
Far-right Vox broke relations with center-right PP “on a national level” over what they said was a “lukewarm” response by Alberto Núñez Feijóo to the amnesty law proposed by Sánchez. The regional and local PP-Vox coalition governments remained intact (Vox be angry, just not that angry).

So we’re up to date. Now, moving forward…

Parliament resumed its weekly activities yesterday and it was as messy as you thought it would be. The coalition government’s priority was to pass three government decrees. As we noted👆, in the end only two (barely) survived.

Sánchez and Díaz hoped to pass (as explained by Reuters):

A so called “omnibus” decree (which included the digitalization of the judiciary and “new criteria for hiring public servants to promote equality”).
An “anti-crisis” decree (an extension of measures meant to help Spaniards cope with high costs of living—think reduced VAT basic staples—as well as measures designed to help Spain qualify for a new pile of EU funds).
A decree reforming unemployment subsidies (mainly spearheaded by Sumar).

Passing these decrees was never going to be an easy task because nearly every party had their own (contradictory) agenda—especially Junts.

Leading up to Wednesday’s vote, El Mundo explains, Junts warned that there were three main points that for their party represented “insurmountable differences” and kept them from voting in favor:

Risks to the future amnesty bill. An article in the omnibus decree modified the Civil Procedure law in a way that could halt the implementation of the bill for some two years (something the Sánchez government denied).
The underfunding of Catalonia. Junts claimed that measures in the decree would increase the region’s “underfunding” and “undermine” the regional government’s powers (specifically, Junts was asking the central government to pay for public transportation discounts and to increase European funds for the digitalization of the Judiciary in Catalonia).
The flight of companies from Catalonia. Many businesses decided to move their tax domicile elsewhere in Spain after the October 2017 illegal independence referendum. Junts wanted a carrot/stick of tax benefits and punitive measures to entice/force back the companies.

And don’t forget Podemos! They also expressed their discontent with the unemployment subsidies bill.

Podemos warned that they would vote against it unless they eliminated what they called a “reduction” in benefits for people over 52 years old (both PSOE and Sumar argued that there would be no benefits cut, citing the significant increase in minimum wage in recent years).

This was all bad news for Sánchez, as “no” votes from Junts or Podemos would sink the bills. And so, with the parliamentary session already under way on Wednesday, the government was still negotiating with Junts behind the scenes so the separatist party would at least abstain (which would allow for the decrees to pass).

Thanks to some last minute behind-the-scenes negotiations, Junts decided to abstain from voting, which meant that at least the omnibus and anti-crisis decrees would pass 172 to 171.
The unemployment subsidies decree, however, wasn’t so lucky. As promised, Podemos voted against it after Sumar refused to make any changes. If you thought this year couldn’t get any stranger, here was far-left Podemos joining far-right Vox and center-right PP to frustrate the ambitions of the PSOE/Sumar government.

At the end of the day, with two of his decrees (barely) approved, Sánchez told reporters that he was satisfied and that “All’s well that ends well”. Yolanda Díaz, however, wasn’t happy to see the unemployment subsidies decree shot down and fired back at Podemos this morning.

So what does this all mean? Like all deals done behind closed doors, this one is a bit shady and we don’t know what actually was agreed.

Junts claims that it got the PSOE to transfer “comprehensive” management of immigration, including that of residence permits and the issuance of documents, as well as "migratory flows".
The Catalan separatist party also says it got the Sánchez government to delete the article from the Criminal Procedure Law that would jeopardize the amnesty; and to…
Publish the fiscal balances—that is, a ledger showing how much each community pays in taxes compared to how much money the central government invests in it in terms of infrastructure and the like. (Catalonia has long complained [or whinged, depending on who’s talking] that it paid too much into the communal pot.)

But really, what does it mean? By all accounts, this signals that the rest of this legislature will be buuuuumpy because every. single. bill. will require a painful negotiation with Junts! Jump on for the ride! 🏄

Oh, and we bet you’ve noticed the absence here of the boss of the center-right PP Alberto Núñez Feijóo? That’s because he’s basically a powerless spectator through this whole thing.

After the deal, Feijóo offered a press conference to say he was “stunned” by what happened yesterday. “If three decrees are capable of putting the government at risk, it’s terrifying to think what this administration will be like”.
Please shed a tear for the lonely guy! No one’s paying attention.

This political year is off to a great start. 🧨

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties this week

1. 😷 Face masks are (kinda) back and there’s nothing you can do to stop them

If it feels like 2020 is never over, it’s because it isn’t.

Cases of respiratory diseases (i.e. the flu) continue to rise in Spain, so Health Minister Mónica García (from Sumar) announced yesterday morning that, starting at noon, face masks were once again mandatory in healthcare centers (hospitals, clinics, etc) in all of Spain’s autonomous communities.

Before you panic, no, we’re not going back to wearing face masks on the subway. In fact, wearing them in places like pharmacies and crowded places is only “recommended”. Ministry officials also recommended “intensifying flu and COVID-19 vaccination”.
Flu and COVID-19 cases have been on the rise in Spain in the last few days (you can blame the holidays and the cold weather for that), which has raised the alarm throughout the country. While experts say that these cases should peak in the coming days, hospitals will probably continue to be crowded until the end of February or early March (seriously, ERs are crazy crowded these days).
Face masks were already mandatory in six communities: Aragon, Asturias, the Canary Islands, Catalonia, Murcia and Valencia. The good news is that this requirement may end once each autonomous community registers a sustained decrease in cases for at least two weeks (those that wish to keep it mandatory may do so).

All 17 communities with Ministry officials gathered on Monday for an Inter-territorial Council to discuss this decision and it was as complicated as you think, because every one of them had a different opinion on how to proceed.

Several PP regional governments weren’t very happy with the ministry’s decision and called it “an imposition” that came as a result of acting “late” during a holiday season that caught minister García by surprise “while she was on vacation”.
Madrid regional head Isabel Díaz Ayuso called the decision an “improvisation”, while Aragon president Jorge Azcón regretted that the ministry was more focused on applying “patches” than “doing its job”.
Fernando López Miras, regional president of Murcia, said his government had decided to make it mandatory to wear face masks in healthcare facilities a week earlier and that “now that the emergency is real” the ministry was trying to “impose” this “late and badly”.
The Andalucía government said it was against it because while the use of a face mask was “recommended” the decision to impose it should be “backed up by data”. Galicia, on the other hand, supported the decision in general but complained that rather than an imposition on all communities, it should have been done based on the epidemiological situation of each territory.

In the end, all autonomous communities are now mandated to comply, like it or not. And while it’s unclear for how long this measure will stay in place, García said that the Council “will adapt to the general epidemiological situation”.

Grab yours before they sell out!

2. 🏖️ ‘Nurdles’ and ‘mermaid’s tears’ are not cute

Residents of coastal towns in northern Spain woke up to a flood of tiny white beads on their beaches last week. Starting in Galicia and then working around to Asturias and then Cantabria, the tide of beads seemed to have no end in sight.

So what are they? Known as ‘nurdles’ and ‘mermaid’s tears’, they are the building blocks of the plastic gear in our lives, from soda bottles to television sets. This plastic feedstock is popular because it’s easy to transport to the factories where it’s melted and formed into the final product.
But plastic in the ocean = bad, right? Yeppers! Indeed, they’re ‘killing our oceans’ according to Popular Science. First, these attractive little beads—they come in colors too!—look like food to sea animals (fish eggs, anyone?), fooling them into eating them. Worse, the persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in seawater build up on them, and are transferred to the wildlife that eat them.

But why is plastic feedstock on Spain’s beaches? On Dec. 8, the cargo ship Toconao, flying under the Liberian flag, accidentally (we hope) dumped six containers 80 km off the coast from the Portuguese town of Viana do Castelo, which sits 20 km from the border with Galicia. One of those containers carried 26 tons of nurdles in 1,000 bags of about 25 kilos each.

The Toconao admitted to Spain’s coast guard that it had, um, lost the nurdles on Dec. 20.
The first nurdles appeared on Spanish beaches, in the Galician town of Muros, on Jan. 3. They spread to Asturias on Jan. 5 and, on Jan. 9, to Cantabria.
The three comunidades so far affected have raised their alert level on Spain’s Plan Territorial de Emergencias de Protección Civil (PLATERCANT) to Level 2, to request help from the central government.
This has—surprise!—caused all sorts of political drama, as Galicia (run by the PP and home to Alberto Nuñez Feijóo) only declared Level 1 at first, and the central gov (run by the PSOE) said it couldn’t effectively help with Level 2. Then the PP-led Cantabrian government said it “regretted” that the central gov wasn’t acting more rapidly.

For now, citizens in the affected areas are the ones cleaning the beaches—with household implements like food strainers and vacuums.

"Cleaning them completely is almost impossible. But the time to do something is now. Within a few days, weeks or months the pellets will begin to mix with other components. And then forget about it," Fernando, a doctor in biological sciences and CSIC researcher, told El Independiente.
But, maybe not… Valladares says, because the pellets are "largely inert" plastics, the smartest thing might be, strangely, not to clean them up considering the damage cleaning can cause. The real thing to do is make sure they don’t get dumped again.

Next up? País Vasco is expected to see the nurdles soon. Fun times!

3. 🛂 Welcome, Kosovars!

Spain eliminated visa requirements for travelers from Kosovo, which may not sound like a big deal but sorta is. Spoiler alert: It has to do with Catalonia!

Spain, along with the rest of the EU, dropped its visa requirements for Kosovars on Jan. 1, fulfilling a decision the bloc made in March.
Happy Kosovo! Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti wrote on Facebook, “On the eve of the 16th anniversary of [our] independence, Spain joined the EU states that recognize Kosovo’s passport.”

Why so happy (and a little surprised) in Kosovo’s capital Pristina? Spain has long been one of the few (5) EU holdouts—the other are Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Cyprus—who haven’t recognized Kosovo. And back around the time the EU visa-free scheme for Kosovo was approved, Spain’s foreign minister José Manuel Albares said Madrid’s non-recognition of Kosovar statehood “entails the non-recognition of Kosovo passports”.

Has anything changed? Apparently, not really. Albares told reporters that Spain “of course” was putting into place the EU-wide visa-free scheme, but he was sure to add that "Spain applies this measure as a member of the Schengen area, as do all states that do not recognize Kosovo within the European Union -- and many others in the world.”

There’s something else going on here, right? Indeed there is. Spain, along with the other EU holdouts on Kosovo statehood, all have large minority or secession-minded groups that they don’t want to give hope to by recognizing a breakaway state (Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008). As Albares noted, “Spain still does not recognize Kosovo, the sovereignty or independence of Kosovo because we do not recognize unilateral declarations of independence.”

Elephant in room. The Kosovo of Spain would be Basque Country or Catalonia, especially the latter. Spain is loath to give hope to Catalan separatists after the region’s pro-independence leaders unconstitutional 2017 independence referendum.

But now that they support the government… Catalan separatist parties Junts and ERC support the Spanish government of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, leading to speculation that the Kosovo visa-free move was a concession to them. A Spanish government spokesperson denied to the FT that it was.

4. 🎨 A Pissarro, Nazis, and possession being 9/10 of the law

@rtvenoticias Este cuadro de Pissarro se quedará en el Museo Thyssen. Después de más de 20 años de litigios el museo ha ganado el caso de esta obra exfoliada por los nazis Su dueña tuvo que malvenderlo para poder escapar de la Alemania nazi. Su nieto, y después sus descendientes, batallaron para recuperar el cuadro. Ahora, un tribunal de California reconoce que el Thyssen es su propietario legítimo. Pero dicen que, moralmente, deberían devolverlo. #arte #pissarro #thyssen

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How hard can it be to determine who owns a piece of art stolen by the Nazis? In Spain, very, very hard.

A US appeals court determined this week that Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza museum can keep a piece of art in its collection—Camille Pissarro’s 1897 work Rue Saint Honore, apres midi, effet de pluie—despite clear proof that it was stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family. So a legal victory but, you know, awkward.

The decision culminates an almost two-decade legal battle, launched by the family of Lilly Cassirer, who was forced in 1939 to sell the painting for around $360 to attain exit visas to leave Nazi Germany. After the war, Cassirer received 120,000 German marks in reparations from the German government (about $28,500 at the time) but did not give up her rights to the painting.

Quiet period. Nothing much happened with the painting—it bounced between owners—until Barón Thyssen-Bornemisza bought the artwork for $360,000 in New York’s Stephen Hahn Gallery in 1976.
National possession. Spain then bought much of the Baron’s collection for $338m in 1993, to be displayed at a museum in his name.
What, it’s still out there? In 2000, Lilly Cassirer’s grandson Claude learned that the painting—now worth about $30m—was being shown at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum. And then things got tense.

After failing to get the Thyssen-Bornemisza to voluntarily return the painting to his family, Claude Cassirer started the legal battle in 2005. In the last two decades, the case has made its way up to the U.S: Supreme Court, with much of the arguments over the jurisprudence of which location—California, where the Cassirer family lives, or Spain—took precedence.

The California US appeals court decided in the end that Spain’s claim won. “The application of Californian law to this litigation would considerably harm the interests of Spain, while the application of Spanish law would harm relatively little the interests of California,” they wrote.
Circuit Judge Carlos Bea said Spain's interest in providing its museums "certainty of title”—Spanish law defines ownership as six years of uninterrupted possession—basically took precedence over California's goal of deterring theft and obtaining recoveries for its residents who were victims of stolen art.

Maybe it’s the law, but is it right? The judges voted 3-0, and the Thyssen was very pleased by the outcome.“It is good news,” said the museum’s managing director Evelio Acevedo: “The good faith acquisition of this work by this institution is something that has been demonstrated from the first moment.”

Laws? Shmaws. But one judge thought the ruling, though legally correct, was ick to her moral compass. "Spain, after reaffirming its commitment to the Washington Principles on art confiscated by the Nazis by signing the Terezin Declaration on Holocaust-era Property and Related Issues, should have voluntarily renounced the painting,” Judge Consuelo Callahan wrote. “Our ruling is constrained by the district court's factual findings and applicable law, but I wish it were otherwise,”

The Cassirers will ask for the decision to be reviewed. And they are not happy with Spain. “The Cassirers believe that, especially in light of the explosion of antisemitism in this country and around the world today, they must challenge Spain’s continuing insistence on harboring Nazi-looted art,” their lawyers said.

Time for another round?

5.🫅🏿A Blackface scandal. Again.

*facepalm*

New year, same scandals.

Once again Spain is making the global headlines after videos of people in blackface go viral on social media.

You know the drill. It happens every year around the Jan. 6, a date that, besides being associated with the storming of capitol buildings, in Spain is also synonymous with joy, parades, a sexy wise man (more on that below) and candy.

That’s right, the Epiphany celebrations (aka the cavalcade of Magi) are pretty big in Spain. For some it’s even bigger than Christmas!

And every year, Balthazar—who has traditionally been portrayed as a black man—becomes the center of controversy after some people who didn’t get the memo that blackface is racist end up, well, dressing up in blackface (because apparently “there are no black actors in Spain”?).

The debate on racism and cultural sensitivity was ignited once again after a series of blackface-related incidents in Madrid and in small towns around the country. Last week, a video created for residents of Madrid’s Chamartin district went viral, showing a white man playing Balthazar in backface and—to make things worse—he was using a weird accent that apparently was supposed to be West African but felt more like he was making fun of it.

The Madrid City Hall, which was responsible for the campaign, quickly apologized for it and explained that six different actors had been hired to play Balthazar, five of them were black and one was white.
When it came to shooting that specific video, the five black actors were apparently unavailable (two of them had COVID) so they chose to go with the white guy. Madrid officials agreed that the video should have never been done and blamed a third-party they hired to do the job.
The left-wing opposition was having none of it, with Enma López (PSOE councilwoman in Madrid) calling it “racist, in poor taste and paid with public funds” and Manuela Bergerot (spokesperson for Más Madrid) saying it was “profane, shameful and (mayor) Almeida should give us an explanation”.

Why does this keep happening? Many people in Spain continue to see this as “tradition” that is absolutely, most definitely not racist.

In the video above (trigger warning!), you will see over 300 people gathering for the parade in the Valencia town of Alcoy and they are all wearing blackface. Local woman Nuria Fuster and her husband Arne Wegner have worked to gather signatures against this, explaining that it’s an “exaggerated, mocking ritual that comes from slavery”.
Rita Bosaho, the first Black woman in Spain's parliament, said these incidents “tarnish the memory of enslaved people and disempower Black children”.

Don’t expect this to go away. Odds-on it will happen again next year.

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We’ll be back next week with more.