🗣️ This Week in Spain: How do you say 'Drama' in Catalan?
Also sad footballers, a battle elephant and maybe cancel your move to Andorra?
By @IanMount and @AdrianBono | September 21, 2023 | Madrid | Issue #29
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🥜 This Week in a Nutshell: Happy first day of autumn! All hell broke loose in Parliament on Tuesday after MPs started using co-official languages on the floor, irritating the right-wing parties and causing the biggest language confusion and work disruption since the Tower of Babel.
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You say ‘tomato’, I say ‘Go f*** yourself’
Madrid Goes Full Babel
Borja Sémper, a Basque Country-born bigwig in Spain’s center-right PP, spoke a few sentences in Basque (or Euskera, as the language is known in Basque) from the speaker’s dais in parliament on Tuesday.
Not to celebrate the new approval of the use of Spain’s “co-official” languages (Euskera, Catalan and Gallego) but in order to criticize MPs for using these regional languages instead of the Castilian Spanish that all Spaniards know and share.
Other MPs laughed, clapped, or booed. The parliament’s speaker repeatedly asked for silence. And the members of far-right Vox, theoretically allies of the PP, walked out—for the second time in the day.
So, yeah, languages are a big deal in Spain. Or a tense subject. Or the third rail. What you speak is identity. Who you are—and who you aren’t. You get the idea.
This all, of course, comes back to politics. As we wrote last week, the approval of the use of co-official languages in parliament was a condition set by the Catalan pro-independence parties ERC and Junts in exchange for supporting the election of former Balearic Islands president Francina Armengol (of the PSOE socialists) as parliament speaker last month.
But now it’s happened and it (predictably) was a mess! Vox walked out the first time in protest of the use of the co-official languages, after PSOE deputy José Ramón Besteiro became the first to use one when he began speaking in Gallego.
One by one, the Vox MPs left the earpieces (pinganillos) they’d been given to listen to the translation of the co-official languages on the seat of caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (see video above).
Fun fact: Parliament is expected to spend up to €280,000 on translation through the end of the year, including tech, interpreters, and so on.
Besteiro was the first but far from the last. Marta Lois of Sumar, the PSOE’s far-left partner party, also spoke in Gallego, and suggested that people all over Spain study the co-official languages (not a bad idea, tbh). Maite Aizpurua, spokesperson of the Basque-separatist EH Bildu, spoke in Euskera, as did Joseba Andoni Agirretxea, of the PNV Basque nationalists.
But it was Gabriel Rufián of the left-leaning ERC Catalan separatists whose speech in Catalan attracted the most attention. Not because of what he said (Castilian isn’t persecuted in Catalonia, Catalán speakers aren’t all separatists, etc etc), but for how he said it.
While Rufián may be a Catalan nationalist, he is also the Catalonia-born son of Andalusians whose first language is Castilian, and it seems like his command of the Catalán language is…not great. “In all seriousness, I am Catalán and I find it hard to understand him,” said one observer, while another mused, “Rufián speaks Catañol” and another said “Rufián speaks Catalán as well as [Sumar boss] Yolanda Díaz does English” (ouch!).
Most cutting was PP deputy Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo (aka the Spanish right’s Cruella de Vil) who wrote on X (né Twitter), “Unexpected technical difficulty: Rufián has to be translated to Catalán”.
But while the parliamentary floor in Madrid was all fun and games (and talk about how allowing in the co-official languages was either a long overdue recognition of Spain’s cultural diversity or a divisive scam that would break the country into tiny pieces), Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s bid to bring Spain’s multiple-personality identity crisis to Europe’s main stage didn’t go quite as well.
You see, one of his other promises to get the votes he needs to repeat as PM was to push Catalán, Euskera and Gallego as official EU languages—meaning they could be used in the European Parliament and EU documents would be translated into them.
Let’s just say that there was some reticence among the Europeans. As we also noted last week, several countries pushed back on adding them to the 24 already there, (because, expensive) and because it could open the door to even more languages (even more expensive). Last year, the European Commission spent €355 million on translations, and they maybe aren’t super-excited about upping that.
Spain holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union right now, offering Sánchez a perfect opportunity to bring up the issues. But the other countries on the council nixed Spain’s desperate push for a swift addition of the three languages, even after Spain said please please we’ll even pay for the cost and you can do it slowly and and and….
“No one can expect a decision to be taken in Brussels in one morning on a proposal whose paper version has just reached us that same day," the Irish representative said, according to El Español, while another diplomat complained “They’ve brought a national problem to the European level.”
Spain’s foreign minister José Manuel Albares then apparently suggested the EU just push Catalán through for now, which sorta makes it obvious whose votes Sánchez needs to repeat as PM (and seems to have royally ticked off Basque leaders).
EU diplomats threw up their hands at the end, saying that they could return to the subject in three months. "It is not just about the issue of Catalan: we are changing the logic of the EU linguistic regime and that can have an impact on dozens of other regional languages,” one said, according to El Español. “This is opening Pandora's box."
In other words: No go, Pedro. (Or as Rufián might say, “De cap manera, Pere”.)
The question now is how (if at all) this Euro setback will affect PM Pedro Sánchez’s chance at another term. Carles Puigdemont, the boss of Catalan separatist party Junts now living in the Brussels suburbs, apparently thinks enough has been done, giving the PSOE room for optimism. So maybe “Yes go, Pedro”? We’ll see next month.
Last minute addition: on Thursday morning, Parliament voted in favor of approving the use of co-official languages (PP and Vox voted against it).
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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties this week
1. 😞 Spain’s unhappy footballers
Most of us would be totally thrilled to be called up to Spain’s international women’s soccer squad—most of us, that is, except the actual members of Spain’s international women’s soccer squad.
It’s been one month since they won the 2023 Women’s World Cup and less than that since their hated coach Jorge Vilda and non-consensual kissing football association boss Luis Rubiales were fired and resigned (respectively).
Now the team is back in action with a game Friday against Sweden as it tries to advance in the UEFA Women’s Nations League.
You might think that they’d be happy to play after getting rid of the widely loathed Rubiales and Vilda. You’d also be wrong.
When new women’s coach Montsé Tomé published the list of tapped footballers, there was immediate and fierce pushback from the footballers and their friends. Why?
Of the 23 players Tomé called up, 15 had been on the championship World Cup team. More importantly, 20 had signed a petition slamming the Spanish RFEF soccer federation—expressing their “enormous discontent” with the federation’s treatment of women and demanding five specific, and extensive, changes before they returned to the national team.
The players who signed that petition then released another after Tomé released her list, reiterating their “firm desire not to be called up.”—i.e. they planned to strike against the national team until the changes were made.
That’s when things got ugly. Really very unpleasant, actually. It came out that players who did not show up when named to the national team could face a fine of up to €30,000 and other penalties. Also, Jenni Hermoso, the player on the receiving end of Rubiales’ non-consensual kiss, was not called up—leaving people to wonder if she was being punished.
Ana Crnogorcevic, a Swiss footballer who plays in Spain, lashed out at the call-up on X (né Twitter): “This is insane… how can you threaten your own player like this…😳 call them to the national team, when they said they want clear changes before they come back! this is soooo disrespectful… clearly they don’t care… and they don’t allow them to make their own decision.”
And Jenni Hermoso herself asked the obvious question—”Protect me from what, and from whom?”—when Tomé said she’d left the star off the list to “protect her.” (Tomé also said “I am not Jorge Vilda”, which is demonstrably true but not nearly as interesting.)
So no players showed up and it was crazy, right? Fight!
Well, actually no. The players did show up (stone-faced—see video above) on Tuesday after, you know, being chosen against their will and learning that they could be fined. And following a series of long, late-night meetings with the RFEF and Spain’s sports minister, all except two agreed to end their boycott in exchange for a “series of agreements” regarding changes to the RFEF.
The pair who refused to play—Barcelona’s Mapi León and Patri Guijarro—were assured they would not be punished.
Now it’s off to Sweden to play. The last time the team was at war with the RFEF, they won the World Cup, so the unhappiness/grumbling acceptance might seem like good news for counterintuitive motivational types, but it’s really unlikely to work that way repeatedly. Spanish football really needs to fix itself, right?
2. 💶 GDP not so bad but, really, still sorta bad
Spain’s national statistics agency revised the country’s pandemic-era (2020-22) GDP numbers upwards by 1.3%, a move that in turn lowered the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio from around 112% to under 110%.
Stronger-than-estimated economic recovery? Less debt? Undeniably great news, right? Well, yeah. Sorta. Because…politics, and statistics.
It seems bizarre at first glance that Spain’s data was so off, but it’s really not. At times of great uncertainty, the first numbers are normally wrong. And economists had been pointing out that the weak economic growth numbers being reported didn’t fit with the booming jobs numbers being reported at the same time. In other words, the revision makes sense.
The upwards revision was especially driven by higher-than-estimated household consumption in 2021, and higher exports in 2022.
Now, time to define the narrative (the relato, as they say in the Spanish papers).
For the government of Pedro Sánchez, this was a time for chest-beating (“More and higher quality growth” they wrote) about how their employment-protecting policies had been the right ones, and that the right’s talk about Spain being last-in-line in the EU and not recovering its pre-pandemic GDP until 2023 had been wrong (it actually recovered in 2022).
Even better, the Sánchez folks (and those who love them) pointed out, Spain would even be one of the leading big-EU economies based on the EU’s 2023 predictions. Exhibit A:
“But, but, but…” said the right. Conservative economists like Daniel Lacalle and Lorenzo Bernaldo de Quirós said that almost every country was revising their numbers upwards, and once that was taken into account, Spain was still at the back of the line in terms of COVID recovery.
Other countries indeed did revise their own numbers up. The U.K. by 1.7%, the Netherlands by 1.3%, and Italy by 1.8-2.1%. Only France revised down.
Sorry to say it, but in the end it’s a muddle. Spain was less of a disaster than feared, but it’s not a world-beater either. We did fine. C+/B-. It could be worse. (Again, sorry, not really invigorating is it?)
3.🔞 AI used to create deepfakes of underaged girls in Extremadura
The town of Almendralejo, in Badajoz, is in an uproar over a serious scandal that involves a group of teenagers and deep fakes that could become a serious case of child pornography and is going up all the way up to the European Union.
This week the police began investigating at least 22 reports regarding photos of teenage girls that had been manipulated using artificial intelligence to make them appear naked (AKA “deepfakes”) and had been disseminated on social media. The reports were filed by the parents of the victims featured in the images, who are between 12 and 14 years old.
The police indicated that the perpetrators are the same age as the victims and “at first glance, everything points to them being from the victims’ environment”. As some of them are already 14 years old, they might be criminally accountable, at least according to Spain’s Juvenile Criminal Law, explained Javier Izquierdo, the head of the Minor Protection Group of the Central Cybercrime Unit.
The boys who created the images apparently generated them using an AI program, and then disseminated them via WhatsApp and Telegram groups until some of the victims’ relatives came across them and sounded the alarm.
Local authorities have warned that if the images are realistic, even if they are manipulated, they can be considered child pornography.
Izquierdo explained that unaccountable minors (those under 14 years old) are not subject to the Minor’s Law so it’s up to the Prosecutor’s Office to decide what kind of punishment they should get for their actions.
If the suspects were of adult age, “the sentences for the production of child pornography range from 2 to 5 years” in prison. And if the victims are under 16 years old, “the penalty is aggravated from 5 to 9 years,” he explained.
The case was so big it even Acting Digital Transformation Minister Nadia Calviño got involved and commented on the case without directly mentioning it, saying it was “urgent” for the EU to approve the new regulation on artificial intelligence.
"In our country right now, there is a great concern regarding the issue of artificial intelligence (...) and that is why I think it is essential that we approve this regulation because it precisely guarantees, among other elements, that there is a watermark on images that have been manipulated using artificial intelligence," she said.
4.🇦🇩 Rich Youtubers foreigners are ruining Andorra
A few years ago, Spanish YouTubers began a mass exodus to the tiny country of Andorra, where they would set up residence because of its lower tax levels (for some reason, many influencers suddenly turn libertarian when they start making money).
But when people started migrating to the neighboring principality en masse, it caused a real estate boom that increased housing prices to such an extreme that now Andorrans are dealing with a massive housing crisis. And the local government has had enough, so this month they enacted a moratorium that temporarily bans foreigners from buying property.
Property sale prices in Andorra have jumped 12.8% between Q4 of 2022 and Q1 of 2023. That is quite a jump. And according to opposition leader Cerni Escalé it is forcing “some citizens to leave the country” because they can’t afford to live there anymore.
The head of the government, Xavier Espot, said the moratorium was “temporary” and would remain in place until “affordable rental housing can be built” and that it sought to avoid “an influx of real estate transactions” while the government discusses the specifics” of their tax schemes that so many Youtubers are loving so much.
Andorra has seen a 20% population increase in just the last 10 years: it went from 69,966 inhabitants in 2013 to 83,990 in 2023.
The problem is that salaries in the principality are low but property prices have skyrocketed (again, thanks Youtubers!) as lots of rich people are moving there attracted by the country’s “way of life, security and healthcare,” explained Conxita Marsol, the Minister of Presidency and Housing of the Andorran government.
It’s estimated that there are approximately 3,000 vacant rental houses in Andorra. But people living there can’t afford them. As 33-year-old electrician Damià Sifreu told eldiario.es, “We are going from the Andorra where you could buy things at good prices to the luxurious Andorra. It seems like we're becoming a Monaco or Luxembourg, but with low salaries."
Most of the new properties being built are “intended for foreigners, not for residents”. In a country in which salaries are stagnant, that’s kind of a recipe for disaster.
Maybe they should try becoming YouTube influencers. Then they could maybe afford one.
5. 🐘 Wanted: Julius Caesar's fighting elephant
Never has installing hospital radiation therapy machines turned into something so exciting! Back in 2019, Amancio Ortega (you know, the bazillionaire who founded Zara), donated €40m to install high-tech machinery in Spanish hospitals. Three of the machines were meant for Córdoba’s Reina Sofía hospital, making it the first in Andalucía with the technology.
But there was a problem (there always is). They needed to dig out a cement bunker for the machinery (because radiation). And once they began to excavate, oh did they ever find some stuff!
It seems there was some serious history on the spot. We’ll let Agustín López Jiménez from Arqueobética, the consultancy that ran the archaeological bit, explain: “At the beginning of the dig we documented structures from the Andalusian Emirate and Caliphate period [8th to 10th centuries]. Beneath them, remains emerged of collapsed adobe walls from the high Iberian period, around the 3rd century B.C.”
And under that? Well, under one of these collapsed walls they found the carpal (hand bone) of “an elephant of large proportions''. And, in addition, “we found 17 catapult projectiles”.
Let the speculation begin! Since the discovery, historians and archeologists have been trying to tease apart what this means.
It turns out that the location, the hill of Los Quemados in Córdoba, could have been the main theater of a large-scale battle that involved African elephants.
Even more exciting, the stars of the battle could have been big. Says El País: “The Roman Gaius Lucius Marcus took the city, which until then had been in Carthaginian hands, in 206 B.C., and in 45 B.C. Julius Caesar, who was protected by the elephants of the Mauretanian king Bogud, expelled the Pompeians during the Roman Republic’s second civil war. Therefore, the questions are: does the bone come from one of [Carthaginian general] Hannibal’s war elephants or one of Julius Caesar’s?”
Can we really know? Eventually, sure. But they haven’t carbon-dated the bone yet. For the moment, we don’t know whose army the elephant’s hand found in the heart of Córdoba belongs to. But we can speculate, and that’s even better.
We know that between 48 and 45 B.C. Caesar’s troops fought around the city of Ulia (today’s Montemayor) against the soldiers of Pompey the Great and his sons Gnaeus and Sextus. After pitched battles, Caesar’s top general asked for help from King Bogud, who may have arrived with reinforcements, possibly with African elephants. Possibly with this elephant…
For now, the ultimate boss is unclear. But tracking down a “battle elephant” in Spain is seriously badass. We mean, don’t mess with Texas Spain, right?
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We’ll be back next week with more.
"we don’t know ... But we can speculate, and that’s even better."
10/10.