Spain Notes, Oct 4: Felipe the Doormat
1/ The inspector who was supposed to close the Teatre nightclub in Murcia didn’t even visit the premises, local media report. He rang them up and sent an email and they made some excuses about legal paperwork being in the pipeline and he thought that was enough and so they weren’t shut down.
2/ Local TV caught up with the arrogant, dismissive owner of the Teatre nightclub, Juan Inglés Rojo, on a street somewhere in Murcia. He refused to say anything, apologise or even offer condolences to the families of the dead.
3/ Other mayors across Spain started to panic and rushed to announce sudden safety checks on their nightclub areas after the fire tragedy in Murcia: Córdoba, Cartagena, Lorca, Elche, Madrid.
4/ In politics, even El País seems lukewarm this morning on Sánchez becoming the new candidate for PM. A “complex and delicate” agreement will now be required and although Sánchez didn’t use the word “amnesty” in his remarks yesterday, “the obvious limit in the pro-independence demands is the self-determination referendum, which has no place in Spain’s rule of law”.
5/ El Mundo sees the King as a “neutrual constitutional moderator” after he named Sánchez as the new candidate for PM, and heard in Sánchez’s comments an “irresponsible” threat to the Constitutional Court on how they should intepret what he described as “generosity” towards Catalan separatist.
6/ ABC: “His speech around ‘coexistence’ and ‘agreement’ in a plural, different Spain that, according to what he said, no one except the PSOE understands, was an obvious demonstration of his readiness to cede an amnesty, whatever it ends up being called, in order to glue his reappointment together”. The King, they write, did his constitutional duty.
7/ A most amusing trending topic appeared on Twitter last night, though: #FelpudoVI. Felpudo = doormat, so literally “#DoormatVI” or perhaps better “Felipe the Doormat”, in refererence to the King. Why? Because some people on the Vox side, always so vociferous in support of His Majesty, are angry that he has now appointed Pedro Sánchez as the new candidate for PM.
8/ How will Vox and Abascal channel this angry new trend? It’s very off-message for them. Will we be seeing TikTok videos of radical Vox supporters chanting “down with Felipe the Doormat” at the constitutionalist anti-amnesty rally in Barcelona on Sunday? They could even make common cause with republican separatists; and more roguish pro-independence supporters might even try to infiltrate the march to try to provoke such chants…
9/ But…Puigdemont might block the vote in favour of Sánchez anyway! The fugitive separatist leader will do a grassroots vote for his “Council of the Republic” organisation to decide which way to turn. And this vote on voting will not take place until…October 17-23. Some 90,000 people are registered for that ballot. Which way will fate blow Spanish politics?
10/ In disgusting scumbag news, police in Madrid, after a tip-off from US cyber-crime investigators, arrested a 25-year old man for raping his months-old baby daughter and offering her for sale to be raped by other men on Instagram. Mum was also arrested. In the US, Florida governor DeSantis tweeted last night that child rape was now a capital crime in that state.
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