PRICK UP HIS EARS

For­eign­ers giv­ing even just a cur­sory glance at Span­ish pol­i­tics will know that in June of this year, the right-wing Pop­u­lar Party (PP) was ousted from power thanks to a vote of no con­fi­dence tabled by the Span­ish So­cial­ist Party (PSOE). Largely un­no­ticed abroad, how­ever, there has been an­other major po­lit­i­cal change: the PP’s for­mer pres­i­dent Mar­i­ano Rajoy has been re­placed by one Pablo Casado. Rajoy was an au­thor­i­tar­ian, le­gal­is­tic con­ser­v­a­tive who - with the ex­cep­tion of the po­lice vi­o­lence he in­flicted on mil­lions of Cata­lan cit­i­zens on Ref­er­en­dum Day (Oct.1st, 2017) - usu­ally played by the book. Mr Casado is a dif­fer­ent ket­tle of fish al­to­gether. Gifted with a seem­ingly per­ma­nent smirk when ad­dress­ing the pub­lic, Casado made his first head­lines when he was still a spokesper­son for the PP, by say­ing - be­fore Ref­er­en­dum Day - that the then pres­i­dent of Cat­alo­nia, Car­les Puigde­mont, “would end up like Lluís Com­pa­nys’” (Com­pa­nys was the de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected pres­i­dent of Cat­alo­nia who was forced into exile in France after Franco’s vic­tory in 1939, ar­rested by the Gestapo at Franco’s be­hest in 1940, tor­tured in Madrid and then shot out of hand in Barcelona). This macabre pre­dic­tion, how­ever, turned out to be just the hors d’oeu­vre for a ver­i­ta­ble feast of un­savoury and du­plic­i­tous de­c­la­ra­tions made after Casado be­came the PP’s pres­i­dent. Among other things, he has ex­pressed his be­lief that ’Span­ish is not taught in Cata­lan schools’ (this is so false as to be barely worth deny­ing); and ac­cord­ing to him, the Cata­lan [po­lit­i­cal] pris­on­ers are given spe­cial priv­i­leges in the Cata­lan pris­ons where they are cur­rently being held (there are no such priv­i­leges, but there has re­cently been an out­right de­mand for the pris­on­ers’ re­lease from AI); as for Cat­alo­nia it­self, it is a “nar­costate” (?) and a “dic­ta­tor­ship” (!); he has de­scribed the ob­vi­ously peace­ful pro-in­de­pen­dence move­ment as “in­trin­si­cally vi­o­lent”; and the yel­low rib­bons which be­deck much of Cat­alo­nia in protest against the im­pris­on­ment and exile of elected Cata­lan politi­cians and civic lead­ers, are, for the grin-laden Mr Casado, “to­tal­i­tar­ian iconog­ra­phy”. While Cat­alo­nia is un­doubt­edly the biggest bee in Casado’s bon­net, he has also seen fit to opine on mat­ters fur­ther afield. The Day of Span­ish­ness, cel­e­brated every Oc­to­ber 12, com­mem­o­rates, for Casado, “the most bril­liant pe­riod of human his­tory”, when Spain “trans­ferred its cul­ture, re­li­gion and his­tory to so many dif­fer­ent places at the same time, as no other na­tion had done be­fore” (he omits to add that the same pe­riod saw the first wide­spread geno­cide of the mod­ern era, with eight mil­lion Amerindi­ans dying in the early years of the ’dis­cov­ery’ alone). As for im­mi­gra­tion, Casado has stated that “we can’t let mil­lions of Africans in” and that, for him, is ap­par­ently that. Mr Casado’s imag­i­na­tion - so fer­tile when it comes to his state­ments on pol­i­tics and his­tory - is equally vivid when he ap­plies it to him­self. He claims he has a post-grad­u­ate de­gree from the Uni­ver­sity of Har­vard, but for­gets to men­tion that this was the re­sult of a four day course which he took in Madrid. He also claims to have an­other post-grad­u­ate de­gree from George­town, which would have meant an 18-month stay in the States (he wasn’t there). There is also some doubt about his Mas­ter’s de­gree from Madrid’s King Juan Car­los Uni­ver­sity, given that he “couldn’t re­mem­ber if he’d at­tended the classes or not” and def­i­nitely did not take the req­ui­site exams. A Madrid judge wanted to take him to the Supreme Court on this issue, as there were “clear in­di­ca­tions of crim­i­nal be­hav­iour” but was stymied by his par­lia­men­tary im­mu­nity. In a nut­shell, the fu­ture prime min­is­ter of Spain could well be this blimp­ish, abid­ingly smug, com­pul­sively men­da­cious lawyer-with­out-a-de­gree. As­sum­ing that Cat­alo­nia will still be par­tic­i­pat­ing in Span­ish elec­tions - by no means a given - it’ll be in­ter­est­ing to see how Mr Casado’s can­di­da­ture af­fects the 4% of the pop­u­lar vote that the PP cur­rently en­joys here.