Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  ‘It is not as if everyone in Lleida was worried about this,’ said Abdelraffie Ettalydy, head of an immigrants’ association. ‘In five years, I have only bumped into one of these women once.’ But Houzi’s followers did not escape his criticism. ‘They are simple people who say: “We are Muslims, so we are better than them”. That is why the mosque has become a problem for the city, and now for Catalonia and Spain as well.’ In a Spain traumatised by the Madrid bomb attacks, the Lleida example is a grim sign of things to come. The mayor may think he is being progressive – but a large section of the city’s population believes it has been targeted purely because of its religion. Further conflict seems inevitable.

  Racist parties are crowing. ‘Measures we proposed three or four years ago that were greeted with cries of “racism” are now being passed by town halls,’ said Joan Terré, a town councillor for Partit per Catalunya in Cervera. He is right. In 2010 the People’s Party, with backing from Convergència i Unió, passed a motion through Spain’s senate that called on the government to prohibit women from wearing burqas and face-covering niqabs anywhere in public. The non-binding motion had to be carefully phrased to avoid the ban applying to the tens of thousands of Christian nazarenos who don hooded robes and parade through Spanish cities every Easter. ‘At this rate we will end up with more bans than burqas,’ quipped the then immigration minister, Celestino Corbacho, himself a former Catalan mayor. The Socialist government simply ignored the motion. But the Partido Popular is now in power. It has yet to be seen whether the government led by Mariano Rajoy will impose a blanket ban. The prime minister fits the retranca stereotype of his native Galicia perfectly. He is a master of political ambiguity whose ability to convince people of differing, or even opposite, beliefs that he agrees with them is legendary.

  Given the degree of alienation obviously felt by both Muslims in Lleida and some of the 11-M train bombers, it seems obvious that Spain has a lot more to do before these immigrants feel properly accepted. The building of new mosques, already a subject of controversy in many places, may soon become a focus for conflict. Even amongst the Latin Americans, who are culturally so close to Spaniards, there is now concern that a new PP government will force some people out. As family members struggle to find work in 2012, Carmen Tejada is worried it will crack down on immigrants without jobs. Her joint Peruvian-Spanish nationality has to be renewed every ten years. ‘I know people who are having to go home because they can’t renew their Spanish passports,’ she told me recently. ‘If you haven’t got a job, they make it more difficult.’ She wonders whether she should not have opted for sole Spanish nationality when the opportunity had presented itself.

  The arrival of the mild-mannered but tenacious Rajoy brought an end to a period characterised by growing social tolerance and expansion of the welfare state. Zapatero’s social revolution – with the introduction of gay marriage, attempts to distance the Church from education and looser laws on both divorce and abortion – may have enraged the more conservative parts of Spanish society, but it had been broadly welcomed. It was part of a thirty-year advance of social liberalism that had even turned Spain into a refuge for those living in more conservative countries. One of the Zapatero government’s last acts was to award Spanish nationality to Ricky Martin, a global music star of Puerto Rican origin, who was reportedly looking for a country where he could feel comfortable being married to a male partner.

  Zapatero’s social successes contrasted, however, with his catastrophic handling of the economy. In 2008, just after he won a second term in office, the economy nose-dived. The global credit crunch and fall-out from the collapse of Wall Street financial services firm Lehman Brothers tipped Spain into recession. But that only revealed a far worse problem – a vastly inflated housing bubble that immediately burst. Suddenly there were 700,000 unsold newly built homes on the market. Residential building ground to a halt, pushing hundreds of thousands of construction workers out of jobs. The boom, egged on by corrupt town halls and bankers too willing to lend money to real-estate developers, also left deep problems in the financial sector. Worst of all, it exposed the parlous state of Spain’s education system, which had dumped one-third of its pupils onto the labour market with no qualifications. While unskilled labourers could find jobs on building sites, that was not a problem. But as Spain struggled to rein in its deficit, public spending on new motorways, high-speed rail lines, airports and museums – the shiny monuments, including many a white elephant, of successful Spain – also dried up. With no building sites or public works programmes to go to, a mass of unskilled workers struggled to find jobs.

  Late in 2011, as Spain dropped back into recession for the second time in three years, I sat on a bench in the sunlit square of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Benalup, a charming pueblo in the bull-rearing country of Cadiz. A few years earlier it had boasted the highest number of top-of-the-range cars in the province. By November 2011 it had Spain’s highest unemployment rate – approaching 40 per cent. Just a few years earlier 80 per cent of Benalup had worked in construction. ‘I just wish I had stayed at school,’ said Juan Carlos Gutiérrez, a nineteen-year-old who – after being held back two years – never progressed beyond the level of a fourteen-year-old. ‘They don’t even know how to write a sentence properly,’ town councillor Vicente Peña complained. ‘People here blame the town council when things go wrong, but what about parents and schoolteachers? Surely they share the blame,’ another councillor, this time a socialist, said. A look at the distribution of school drop-out rates around Spain reveals just how damaging the so-called ladrillo (brick) boom was to the country’s educational and long-term prospects. For the rate was highest not in the poorest regions, but in those – like Andalucia, Valencia, Murcia and the wealthy Balearic Islands – that built the most.

  Ladrillo had another poisonous effect as a catalyst for the unhealthy, often corrupt, relationship between town halls and construction companies who raped the once beautiful Mediterranean coast. The dam holding that corruption out of sight finally burst in March 2006. It did so, inevitably, in Marbella, a place administered by those politicians who had learned their trade from the biggest rogue of all, former mayor Jesús Gil. Police arrested the mayoress – a second-rate folk-singer called Marisol Yagüe – and a dozen town councillors from three separate parties. The town hall was so rotten with corruption that a board of administrators had to be appointed to run it. They inherited a planning nightmare, with thousands of illegal homes under threat of being bulldozed. Evidence at the trial points to a very simple system which Gil’s former right-hand man, Juan Antonio Roca, used to run the town. He took in money from builders and handed it out, in regular instalments, to councillors. When he fell out with a mayor he made sure the councillors on his payroll voted him out. Those councillors also saw to it that illegal building licences and contracts for town services went to Roca’s friends. Yagüe received some 1.8 million euros over three years. The relationship was so close that when she wanted yet more plastic surgery, Roca picked up the bill. Even one Marbella judge – who allegedly had part of his new house paid for by Roca – joined those accused of corruption.

  The arrests in Marbella opened the floodgates. Suddenly mayors, councillors and building developers around Spain were being picked up for similar crimes. At the same time corruption cases began to blossom in regional governments from Valencia and the Balearic Islands to Andalucia. Even the monarchy found itself being dragged into the dirt, with the king’s son-in-law Iñaki Urdangarín, Duke of Palma, accused of cashing in on the largesse of some of the more corrupt administrations. At the time of writing there is feverish speculation over whether the duke, who denies wrongdoing, will be indicted for his dealings with the Balearic Island and Valencia governments. Little surprise, perhaps, that in a poll at the end of 2011 Spaniards should, for the first time since pollsters began asking the questions, give the monarchy a score below 50 per cent on ‘trust’ (the press did better). More worrying is the reaction of Spanish voters to
corruption. As often as not, they have simply voted back the same people who had been lining their pockets.

  Corruption was one of the drivers of a phenomenon that kicked off in Spain and, as the world’s financial centres were being targeted by protesters from the Occupy Wall Street movement, soon spread around the globe. The indignados, or ‘indignant ones’, emerged in May 2011 after a handful of people decided to set up a protest camp in Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol. When police arrested them thousands more came in their place. Within days tens of thousands of people were occupying the square and dozens of other squares around Spain. There was something uplifting about the protests – not in their political content, which was confused and directionless – but in their method. Peaceful and constructive, this was a generation of young Spaniards whom many commentators – including myself – had written off as spoilt, passive spectators. Here, at least, they were trying to have their say – an entire generation engaged with politics. Suddenly, they cared.

  There was much to care about, and not just corruption. Unemployment crept ever higher and looked set to hit almost a quarter of the workforce by 2013. Without apartment blocks or motorways to build, Spain’s workforce must now compete with either better-educated northern Europeans or much cheaper labour in the developing world. It is, quite simply, not prepared. As my own children work their way through Spanish schools I, too, have become aware of the glaring weaknesses of a system in which pupils are tested externally only when – and if – they do university entrance exams. Every other exam, including the state bacca-laureate, is set and marked by their own teachers. A Spanish mania for old-fashioned cramming of facts has its advantages, but is accompanied by little in the way of skills-learning. Inside the classroom teachers are untouchable – regardless of how bad they might be. Outside it, they are an immovable corporatist block. Governments generally leave them alone. The only external valuation of their work comes in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) tri-annual PISA report. This places Spain below the OECD average on the key skills of reading, mathematics and science.

  Zapatero reacted to the economic downturn by first denying Spain was in trouble and, later, by borrowing money to pump into the economy. He eventually accepted warnings that the markets thought Spain was living beyond its means. He was forced to impose the harsh measures insisted on by the euro currency zone’s heavyweights, led by German chancellor Angela Merkel. I once asked him, during an interview, if he felt there was anything at all left-wing remaining in his policies. ‘We haven’t cut spending on education … and we haven’t cut spending on health,’ he replied. But even that was not true. In Spain both education and health are run by the regional governments. These were being ordered to cut their budgets – and schools were suffering as a result. So, too, were health services. It was the price paid for the dilution of Spanish sovereignty that came with joining the euro. Economic policy was, in effect, being made outside Spain. Rajoy was similarly forced to act against his own liberal beliefs, raising direct taxes within just two weeks of taking office.

  Sticking his head into the sand was Zapatero’s biggest mistake, but correcting that error is what eventually cost his party its worst results in the thirty-four years since democracy had been restored. Austerity and spending cuts helped produce mass unemployment and a second fall into recession. In 2009 a senior official at the General Workers’ Union told me that if unemployment went above 4 million, there would be a social revolution. By early 2012 the total was 5 million and rising. Little surprise, then, that Spaniards threw Zapatero’s Socialists out. In November 2011 they awarded Rajoy a landslide victory in the hope that he could fix the mess. At the time of writing, however, it remains unclear whether Spain will survive inside the euro zone – or even what shape that zone will take in the future. Neighbouring Portugal, Italy and Greece have all run into trouble. Spain has fewer problems than any of them, but might still be washed away in the flood.

  The Rajoy government brought still greater austerity and more pain. It also set about reforming an economy that was clearly not competitive. Whether it will improve things, or make them worse (or one, then the other), only time can say. Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to meet and interview both Rajoy and Zapatero. One thing can certainly be said for both of them: they are honest men, neither of whom – despite the rampant corruption that blossomed at the level of regional governments and town halls during the boom years – would have taken a euro from the Spanish state for their own personal benefit. It is a characteristic, in fact, shared by all the prime ministers of Spain over the past thirty years. This is worth noting, if only because of a northern European tendency to lump southerners together as somehow lazy or venal. Spain, in this case, shares neither the high-level corruption of Italy, nor a history of falsifying the country’s accounts, like Greece. Nor has it frittered away its European funds, like Portugal. None of that means it will escape the fallout of the latest round of turbulence sweeping Europe. But it does hold out promise for finding a way back out again.

  Although it is now fashionable to claim that nobody saw the oncoming disaster, that is not completely true. Government officials were already admitting that the housing bubble was beginning to deflate in 2007, though they hoped for a soft landing. That November I wrote an epilogue for the US edition of this book that summed up the size of the boom and captured the possibility that something might be about to go wrong – though I had no idea that, with the credit crunch around the corner, the change would be so calamitous.

  The biggest threat of all to the country’s well-being comes from its over-reliance on the construction industry for providing both jobs and economic growth. In recent years huge fortunes – of the kind not seen in Spain for a century – have been made. Nine Spanish real-estate developers joined the Forbes global list of 946 billionaires in 2007. Their joint worth was 25 billion dollars. The boom, however, is over. As construction slowed at the end of 2007, workers started being laid off. Most of these were recent immigrants – part of a phenomenon that is set to bring deep change to the country … The amazing economic growth of the last decade, however, cannot continue for ever. Only when unemployment grows, forcing Spaniards to compete for jobs with immigrants, will they will find out if they are immune to racist thoughts. I am pessimistic.

  *

  If I feel a special affinity with Spain’s immigrants at this difficult time it is because I, too, am one of them – though my privileged circumstances have obviously made the experience different. One of the pueblos mentioned earlier in this book, Candeleda, has since become my second home. Even there, in a small country town well off the beaten track, Spaniards are learning to live with new neighbours from different cultures – be they Muslims, Latin Americans or Chinese. My new pueblo has been most welcoming to us all. In September 2008 I found myself squeezed into a tie and suit, sitting in the front pew of Candeleda’s church watching the novena – the final mass of a series of nine on consecutive days – while the town choir sang Bach. ‘I don’t believe in this stuff,’ admitted Mayor Miguel Hernández, a socialist and agnostic, who was sitting beside me. ‘But we have to be here.’ It was fiesta time. This was not the August affair when the town fills up with summer vacationers but the more intimate fiesta dedicated to the town’s patroness, a local Marian apparition dating back seven centuries and known as the Virgin of Chilla. The virgin’s fiestas are yet another excuse for a week of late-night partying, loud music in the town square and fun with fireworks, but – with the vacationers gone – they mainly attract townsfolk and people from round about. I was here as the pregonero. This is roughly the equivalent of the person who opens an English village fête, but with the added pomposity demanded by a fiesta that is both religious and a reaffirmation of municipal pride.

  At midnight I stood in front of several thousand Candeledanos on a stage in the middle of the Plaza del Castillo. I avoided the long-winded, baroque format favoured by more traditional pregoneros and,
in relatively few words, thanked them for welcoming people from so many different places and cultures into their previously homogenous community. I had been told to close my speech by calling out the three traditional vivas that mark the start of the fiestas. ‘¡Viva Candeleda!’ I shouted. ‘¡Viva!’ they roared back. I repeated the performance with ‘¡Vivan los Candeledanos!’ and ‘¡Viva la Virgen de Chilla!’ Each cry was greeted by a roar of ‘¡Viva!’ And each ‘¡Viva!’ was another Spanish arrow piercing my heart.

  In a country given to such intense self-reflection about layers of identity it is, perhaps, not surprising that my own family’s idea of itself should be based on an increasingly complex mixture of culture, blood ties, history and loyalties. I was reminded of this on 7 July 2010, as we drove up La Castellana, the ten-lane boulevard that runs north–south through Madrid. Minutes earlier the Spanish soccer team had sealed its place in the World Cup final in South Africa by beating Germany. Carlos Puyol, the Barcelona centre-back, had flown across our television screen – all flowing, heavy-metal hair – to head in the only goal. Now the Spanish team had a chance to lift the World Cup for the first time ever. We took the car out, just as we had two years earlier when Spain became European soccer champions, to join in the honking, cheering, flag-waving celebrations that were bound to erupt across the city. I had not counted, however, on what the crowd who had watched the match on giant screens at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu stadium would do. Rounding a corner we were met by a shirtless mass, flooding down the street, flags, banners and scarves waving. They blocked all the lanes and surged in a loud, euphoric flood of people towards the centre of town. In just a few minutes we were stuck in gridlock, fans clambering on the cars. Two Tremlett boys sat in the back, struck with awe.