Spain Notes, Oct 20: terror alert level + French farmers + Catalan separatists
1/ The Home Office and police both denied the terror threat alert in Spain had been raised to its maximum level of 5 due to the Israel-Gaza conflict. It has been at 4/5 since…2015. Alt-right influences pushed a rumour on social media that it really was 5.
2/ The Mayor of Madrid, Almeida (PP), said 5 would be a good idea. The Home Office did announce some mostly unspecific additional measures to the longstanding, and thus nationally unnoticed, 4. The right-wing accusation is that the government won’t go all the way to 5 because of Podemos and Sumar don’t want to see soldiers on Spanish streets.
3/ There was, briefly, a bomb alert at Madrid’s Atocha station this morning, after someone found a rucksack lying around at a taxi stop.
4/ French farmers behaved as French farmers sometimes do, stopping and tipping whole loads of Spanish produce out onto the roads at the border: drinking the vin, playing boules with bottles of cava, or grabbing some Murcian lettuces for their salade.
5/ PP leader Feijóo, in response to the remarks made yesterday by Aragonès (Esquerra) in the Senate on the amnesty and referendum, said in a TV interview this morning that he thinks Sánchez might go that far in order to be reappointed PM, “no one knows what Mr. Sánchez is negotiating, it’s all in the dark”.
6/ After Aragonès was very clear in the Senate yesterday about what he wanted, to an audience of PP first ministers, El País writes today that the whole upper house should be reformed. Aragonès was “unnecessarily rude” when he walked out, the PP used it for party political ends, “although you can’t blame the opposition for opposing”, and the PSOE should have gone algon, “you can’t win a debate if you’re not there”
7/ El Mundo sides with the PP, seeing in yesterday’s remarks “a defence of equality from territorial diversity”. If the Senate was full of PP first ministers yesterday, it’s because the PP won most of the regional power at the regional elections in May.
8/ Bildu leader Otegi called for the release of Basque hostage Iván Illarramendi from Gaza, where Hamas has him. “We are not in favour of using civilian hostages for doing trades of one kind or another”. Otegi, of course, was convicted of hostage taking himself, with the Basque terror group ETA.
9/ ABC thinks Sánchez’s parliamentary sluggishness as he continues to negotiate his reappointment as PM is now going to have an effect on the EU because Congress won’t be able to ratify the new European electoral law in time for the European elections in 2024. Spain currently holds the presidency of the EU.
10/ Madrid had a historic level of one-day rainfall in a big storm yesterday.
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