Spain Notes, Oct 18: foreign policy + football corruption
1/ After an attack on a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday night, the Minister for Social Rights, Belarra (Sumar) said she now wanted Spain to cut diplomatic ties to Israel and for the EU (Spain holds the presidency at the moment) to impose economic sanctions and an arms embargo.
2/ The Foreign Secretary, Albares (PSOE), said yesterday that there were bound to be differences of opinion in a coalition government but that the voices that counted in terms of foreign policy were the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary.
3/ The PP said Sánchez was “incapable” of sacking Belarra, who was using her ministerial post “to accuse Israel of planned genocide”.
4/ Vox leader Abascal, talking about the latest terror attack in Brussels, said he wanted "to take them out before they kill a single innocent person", and that "they" should be first prevented from coming in.
5/ Vox then clarified what they meant by “they” by announcing they want to see the suspension of the concession of Spanish nationality…"to nationals from Islamic countries”, so Muslims, arguing that the Brussels attack was a result of Europe’s “open doors policy”.
6/ A new CIS survey for October showed the PSOE and the PP drawn on 32 point something of the vote, followed by Sumar on 12% and Vox on 10% and then all of the smaller regionalist parties on less than two percent each.
7/ A judge in Barcelona has decided to investigate the former head of the Spanish intelligence service, the CNI, after the current First Minister of Catalonia, Aragonés (Esquerra) filed a formal complaint over the Pegasus spying scandal, in which security services tapped the phones of 18 Catalan separatist leaders.
8/ Another judge in Barcleona has ruled that Barça chairman Laporta is now a suspect in the Negreira refereeing corruption case.
9/ The investigating judge wrote at the end of September in a ruling that: “the payments produced the refereeing results sought by Barcelona FC, in such a way that there must have existed inequality in the treatment of other teams and the resulting systemic corruption in the whole of Spanish refereeing”.
10/ The First Minister of Catalonia, Aragonés (Esquerra) has decided to give a speech tomorrow, in Catalan, in defence of the amnesty deal in the Senate in Madrid, which is majority controlled…by the PP. All of the PP’s regional first ministers are going…but not the PSOE ones. Aragonès’s decision seems to have caught them all off guard.
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