🤝 This Week in Spain: PSOE and Sumar Shake on It

Also: Royal outtakes, Alcaraz makes a lot of money and more EU language drama.

Oct 26, 2023

By @IanMount and @AdrianBono | October 26, 2023 | Madrid | Issue #34

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

🥜 This Week in a Nutshell: Another week in Spain where lots of things happened and yet it feels like nothing’s happened. In short, the PSOE and Sumar reached a deal to form a coalition government (if they get the votes in Parliament, that is) and the PP is angry about the fact we still don’t know when that vote will take place. Oh, and there’s also been talks of shortening the workweek, eliminating short flights (like in France) and, of course, amnesty. Like we said, nothing new.

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That was the easy part

PSOE and Sumar swear they’re BFFs, but does it matter?

The PSOE and Sumar came to a coalition policy agreement this week that will have the two support caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s bid for reelection to Spain’s top job, which is kind of like fixing whatever was wrong with the dishwasher just as the house is burning down around you.

But seriously folks…there are some interesting policies in the agreement, which we’ll outline here.
Still, the chance of it ever coming to light depends on the decision of one man, a man who lives in a McMansion in a Brussels suburb. Let’s hear it for… Carles Puigdemont (you know the guy—the separatist leader who spearheaded the 2017 illegal independence referendum in Catalonia and who now lives in self-imposed exile while still being the spiritual leader of his pro-independence party Junts).

First, the agreement. As we noted three weeks ago, the PSOE and Sumar set the bar low, giving themselves a whole month to come to a programmatic agreement (because, let’s be honest, they all need more time to convince Sr. Puigdemont), and ended up beating the deadline by a good 10 days.

The pact has 230 points, but the headline news of the agreement is a plan to shorten the workweek. To 37.5 hours in two steps: a trim to 38.5 hours a week next year, and one hour less in 2025.
Spain first legislated an eight-hour workday a century ago, after the La Canadiense strike in 1919. But that was for a six-day workweek. The cut to 40 hours a week was only made law in 1983.
The 37.5 hours thing was met by approval from Spain’s unions—sorta. While they applauded the move, both big unions (the UGT and CCOO) said they wanted to know ‘how’ it would be done (seems like they weren’t part of the negotiations) and they made clear it was only one step toward their goal of a 35-hour week.
But oh did the business lobby not like it! The three big business unions said they were “surprised” it had been planned “behind their back” and called the move “constitutional abuse with an obvious interventionist aim”.
Besides the obvious complaint that it would cost them more, what really heated up the men in suits was that PSOE and Sumar plan to make the change by reforming the Workers Statute, which only requires a vote in parliament, as opposed to going through the process used to, for example, raise wages, which involves negotiations between the unions, the business lobby, and the government.

The second big move is a plan to eliminate or reduce domestic airline routes when there was a train alternative of less than 2.5 hours.

France led the way on this, banning short-haul flights when there were similar train alternatives back in May.
Not totally clear: There are plenty of loopholes in the proposal—like for routes that link with hub airports that have international flights (Madrid and Barcelona come to mind)—that render its likely effect minimal.
The airline union noted that passengers had already switched to trains for these routes—including 80% of those traveling Madrid-Barcelona and 90% of Madrid-Valencia.

But there’s plenty more! The coalition document also includes plans to raise the minimum wage, expand universal public education to two-year-olds, make it harder to layoff workers, the establishment of a maximum waiting list time for medical procedures, and so on.

And when caretaker PSOE PM Sánchez and Sumar boss Yolanda Díaz presented the agreement, he in his usual blue suit and she in a fire-engine-red dress, they kissed like a couple who had been through a war (see above). Which was nice.
If you care: Spain’s previous big far left party, Podemos, which Díaz ate from the inside and now wears its skin (gross, we know), says it wasn’t consulted about the agreement even though it’s part of Sumar, which Díaz’s people say is a lie. Which Podemos bigwig Pablo Echenique says is a lie. So they’re all liars. Or someone is.

But, but, but… Room, meet elephant. Getting the 176 votes needed for Sánchez to repeat at PM will require some high-level calculus on the part of the PSOE and Sumar. Or, rather, just brute mathematics. They will need the ‘yes’ votes of the four main separatist/nationalist parties from Catalonia and Basque Country. And one of them is unpredictable and demanding. Yup, we are talking about Puigdemont’s Junts.

The amnesty issue. We’ve written before about how Puigdemont’s big requirement is amnesty for those involved in the illegal 2017 referendum on separating from Spain. It’s also hugely unpopular among those on the right, and sorta unpopular with a good number in the center and on the left. But that’s the road to 176.
We’re serious. “It’s all well and good that PSOE and Sumar go hand in hand, but it will be of little use if there are no agreements with the Catalan independence parties,” said the spokesperson for the Catalan government, Patrícia Plaja. “It is dead on arrival if the investiture agreements and commitments with Catalonia are not finished.”

And right now Puigdemont is not in his happy place. The pro-independence group he set up to give his leadership of the cause a democratic edge, the Consell de la República, held a vote on whether he should negotiate with Sánchez or say ‘no’ and head to new elections.

Do you want the bad news or the bad news first? 75% of those who voted said Puigdemont should tell Sánchez to take a long walk off a short pier, which not only means Puigdemont wouldn’t be the hero who brought home amnesty, it also means he couldn’t move home to Spain (unless he wanted to go to jail). But only 4% of the 90,000 members voted so…he can ignore them, right? So confusing!

So for now, expect… Oh, let’s be honest, there will be at least one more week of posturing. The PSOE doesn’t want to register an amnesty bill until they know they have Junts’s votes, and Junts doesn’t want to give the PSOE the thumbs-up until it knows it has the amnesty. So…standoff!

Next big date? The PSOE apparently wants to wrap up the agreement before its party congress starts Nov. 10. And if nothing happens by Nov. 27? New elections in January!

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties this week

1. 🗣 EU still not sold on Catalan as an official language

Yes, this again. On Tuesday, the European Ministers of the EU debated for the second time whether to recognize Catalan as an official language and, once again, decided… not to make a decision. (Video above is from a month ago, so just use it for context.)

The request presented by caretaker PM Sánchez is one of the demands made by Catalonian leader Carles Puigdemont in order for his party (Junts) to support Sánchez’s bid to form a coalition government for the next four years.

Not now: The EU is still deliberating over Spain's proposal but it’s pretty clear that they just don’t want to be dealing with this right now. The majority of EU member states continue to express reservations and seek more information and work regarding the proposal.
“Not a priority.” Latvia's Foreign Minister, Krisjanis Karins, said in a recent meeting that increasing the number of official languages in the EU is “not a priority” and that there are other critical issues like, say, geopolitics (you know, Ukraine, Hamas…) that should take precedence.
Lithuania’s a no too. The government of Lithuania, represented by Deputy Foreign Minister Jovita Neliupsiene, and its Ambassador to the EU, supported Latvia’s stance during the meeting, according to media reports.
And the Finns. Finnish Foreign Minister Anders Adlercreutz said that most countries “expressed hesitation in the previous meeting. It's a topic that was brought up very quickly, without any preparation or presentation of what it could lead to, from a legislative and economic perspective." But, true, he acknowledged that the possibility of "using your own language in all communications" is part of "having the best possible representation." He concluded: "I truly hope that we find solutions to this issue.” So do we.

After a brief debate (apparently it lasted around 30 minutes) there was still no consensus for a decision on Spain's proposal to revise the EU's linguistic framework and include Catalan, Galician, and Basque as co-official languages.

But Spain is really trying to make this a thing. It has commissioned an economic impact study from the European Commission to outline the costs of including Catalan, Basque, and Galician as official EU languages—and has also committed to financing these costs, unlike the other official languages, whose use is funded from the EU budget.
Deadline’s a-coming. The next meeting of the EU General Affairs Council is scheduled in Brussels on Nov. 15, very close to the deadline for Sánchez to close his agreement with Puigdemont and avoid an election repeat. However, it’s unclear whether the recognition of Catalan will be on the agenda. Or if other countries really want to schedule their lives around Spain’s political calendar.

2. 👶 How many of Spain’s ‘stolen babies’ were stolen?

The El Pais headline was guaranteed to draw attention: “I don’t know of any confirmed case of stolen babies, but I won’t say none existed.” It wasn’t so much for what the interview said, but for who he was: the director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, Antonio Alonso.

That’s because Alonso knows a bit about identifying people (he runs the country’s forensics institute, which identifies bodies, after all) and he says that a large part of Spain’s famous wave of ‘stolen babies’ during Franco and even after—which some peg at 300,000—may not have existed.

Let’s take a step back. Those who’ve lived in Spain (and many outside) have repeatedly heard from victims associations and lawyers who worked with them that 300,000 babies were robbed from their mothers between the 1940s and the 1990s.

The story is as follows: A woman—usually poor—goes to a hospital to give birth and does, but then the nun on call tells her that the baby was stillborn. The baby is alive, however, and is given to a wealthy Catholic family that has paid. Sometimes, the mothers are shown the body of a dead baby as proof (the office of one Madrid doctor, Eduardo Vela, was said to be notorious for having a frozen body on hand).
But the mothers doubt the stillborn story, and in the 1980s, Spanish media began to publish stories from mothers—and later children—who said they had suffered involuntary adoptions.

Because of these widespread stories—and the credible reports of mothers being reunited with children they hadn’t put up for adoption—what Alonso says is so surprising.

“To my knowledge, there is no confirmed case of stolen babies, meaning a modus operandi in which the death of a baby was simulated, in a private or public hospital, to steal it and sell it to whatever mafia.”
To back this up, Alonso points to the 120 children’s coffins that were exhumed by his office to see if they were empty. In 117 cases, they found bones and in 90% of the cases they could extract DNA they were able to link them to their families.
And, he suggests, some families just couldn’t handle the truth. “Most of the families said: ‘Great, this uncertainty we had is over.’...[but]… When we were able to prove that the babies had died, some parents didn't believe it. No matter how much we showed them scientific evidence that their children were there, they did not believe it. It caught our attention: the relatives believed that we were deceiving them.”

So what does Alonso think happened instead? In many cases, he says he believes the women consciously gave up their babies, very possibly under coercion, and that in many cases “fraudulent practices” were then used, such as not putting the baby up for official adoption but instead registering the baby as having been born to another woman, often sterile, whose family had paid for the child.

The most famous case of Eduardo Vela was apparently one of these. Courts found that Inés Madrigal had not been stolen, but rather that after her mother agreed to hand her over, had been illegally registered as the birth child of another woman.

Now, Alonso isn’t saying that no babies were stolen. He largely agrees with Judge Baltasar Garzón who wrote in 2008 that in the 1940s and 50s Franco-aligned religious institutions held some 30,000 children whose parents were killed, exiled, imprisoned or underground.

“Did that happen? Of course,” Alonso says. But, he adds of the later robbed babies, “I won’t say that it never happened, I said that we have not seen a case of newborn abduction. I haven't found it. Could it exist? Yes, but was there a newborn abduction mafia? A mafia of gynecologists from public hospitals? Medical teams from many public hospitals are being questioned, without any evidence.”

Spain’s stolen babies history is a grim one, no matter its exact contours. Considering the credible stories already mentioned, and Alonso’s focus on only legal cases (which many times won’t look at the claims because of the statute of limitations), it’s clear that there were plenty babies taken—not to mention a big business in baby trafficking.

But how many? That is where Alonso—who supports the creation of a national DNA bank to help in identify babies as well as the civil war and dictatorship dead in places like the Valle de Cuelgamuros (aka the Valle de los Caídos)—questions the repetition of the 300,000 figure without more proof.
“I believe that an important cognitive bias has been generated,” he says. “‘If they tell me that at the time there were 300,000 cases, why not me?’”

3. 🇵🇸 Israel-Hamas war continues to drive wedges in Spain

Toni Morillas y Nicolas Sguiglia, de Con Málaga, posando con la bandera frente al Ayuntamiento. — Toni Morillas and Nicolas Sguiglia of Con Málaga pose with the flag in front of city hall (Photo: EUROPA PRESS)

Podemos’s local Málaga offshoot hung a pretty giant Palestine flag from city hall and—surprise!—controversy followed.

The clandestine banner-draping happened Tuesday when members of Con Málaga Toni Morillas and Nico Sguiglia dropped the 4x8 meter banner off the city hall terrace for several minutes.
Con Málaga claimed they had okayed the move with the police, while city hall representatives said they had not.
Then Con Málaga said they’d been asking to hang the flag for a while (in vain) because the local PP-led government had illuminated the city hall facade with Israel’s colors in support of the victims of Hamas, so it seems they didn’t have permission. But anyway…
Con Málaga’s Sguiglia said, "we are experiencing an authentic moral and humanitarian catastrophe with the siege and bombing by the Israeli government of the population of the Gaza Strip."
PP mayor Francisco de la Torre replied that hanging the flag just “can’t be done and it shows their partiality in the analysis of the conflict," suggesting that Con Málaga had picked a side in the Israel-Hamas war, and it wasn’t Israel.

The spat comes at a tense moment, just days after Israel’s ambassador to Spain suggested that Podemos was aligned with “ISIS-type terrorism” for coming out against Israel’s response and calling for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to be brought up on war crime charges.

Left/Right battle: It also shows that either/or support for Israel or Palestine is becoming a political litmus test in Spain (as seen in last week’s Madrid regional assembly fight), when one might think politicians could hold two ideas at once—that Hamas’s massacre of Israeli citizens should be condemned and punished, and that Palestinian civilians’ safety and aspirations should be respected.

4. 🎾 Carlos Alcaraz gets how much just for showing up?

Spanish tennis wunderkind Carlos Alcaraz hit the headlines this week for a largely undiscussed side of the sport: appearance fees.

There are times when someone pulls back the curtain on the backstage machinations of professional athletes, and Herwig Straka, the director of the Vienna ATP 500 tournament, did just that.

Alcaraz is not playing the Vienna tournament, in theory to give him time to recover from a series of minor injuries that have bothered him in a disappointing stretch since he won Wimbledon (the last trophy he took home, and not a bad one at that).

But then tournament director Straka revealed another reason: Alcaraz’s appearance fee. Tennis players don’t just make money from prizes and brand sponsorships. The top players also charge small and midsize (ATP 250 and 500 level) tournaments just to show up and give the event cachet—as well as attract TV audiences and sell tickets.
The issue is that Alcaraz doesn’t come cheap. “He’s too expensive. He wants €750,000” to play, Straka told Der Standard, saying the quiet part out loud. With a €12 million overall budget, €750,000 was too rich for the tournament, no matter how hot Alcaraz is these days.

Alcaraz’s fee is not that weird, to be fair. Spanish football paper Mundo Deportivo notes that Roger Federer’s usual fee was around $1 million, and Alcaraz—the world #2— is the current hot ticket for tennis tournaments.

And you think that’s high? Getting top players to come to an exhibition (unofficial) event can cost $2 million.

World #1 Novak Djokovic is not playing at Vienna either, as he concentrates on the biggest (and highest paid) tournaments.

Both Alcaraz and Djokovic are both expected to play starting next week in the Masters 1000 of Paris. Masters 1000 tournaments—a level above the ATP 500 of Vienna—are essentially mandatory for top players if they aren’t injured, however.

5. 🎬 The King (then Prince) was an awkward teenager too

We’re only days away from Princess Leonor’s 18th birthday, when she is expected to take the oath to uphold the Constitution just like King Felipe VI did before the Courts on Jan. 30, 1986.

Article 61 of the Constitution establishes that, once they turn 18, the heir to the throne shall swear to faithfully perform their duties, uphold and enforce the Constitution and laws, and respect the rights of citizens and the autonomous communities. So on Oct. 31 Spain is celebrating Halloween and the oath ceremony. Which both involve costumes. But we digress.

Many moons ago (37 years and 8 months, to be exact) King Felipe de Borbón (then Prince) was about to turn 18 and he was rehearsing his oath speech, which was going to be broadcast by TVE.

Turns out that, yes, royals, they are just like us. (Sorta.) And some fun outtakes have now seen the light of day, showing young Felipe in gala attire screwing up his lines—and laughing at his mistakes
He is seen redoing several takes in the gardens of Zarzuela Palace because he felt they were unflattering or because he stumbled over some of the words in the message.
“I am going to take an oath before the Courts...." Felipe says before stopping suddenly. "No, I said 'an oath,' not 'my oath.'" He then resumes but immediately goes silent: "The lighting changed, and I got distracted," he says while laughing.

The unusual video has been making the rounds on social media because it’s rare to see Spanish royalty be so relaxed in front of the cameras. Sure, we have a Queen that raps, but even that is still carefully choreographed. So to see the current King be, well, human, feels like a breath of fresh air.

Maybe 37 years from now we may be treated to Leonor’s outtakes (hopefully sooner). In the meantime, you can expect both King Felipe and Queen Letizia to join their daughter this Tuesday for the swearing-in of the Constitution.

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