Cosas de España/Galiza

Spanish politics, Dirty Tricks department. Lenox Napier reports here on a bizarre development of this week.

This is for anyone considering the original Camino de Santiago – El Primitivo . . . This and this might will prove useful reading. Essential, even. In all modesty . . 

Talking about needing to be fit . . . I noted last week that a huge warehouse in the small industrial park I pass through 4 times a day is now a CrossFit centre. Friends tell me this exhausting activity is now the rage, with Pontevedra city being home to several new centres. I’m not sure the inventor/licensor will be making any money from these. Anyway, I think I’ll stick to walking as fast as I can manage. 

Back to the speedboats used by our narcotraficicantes, when they aren’t using mini-submarines . . . . As you’d expect, there are horses for courses – different models, depending on where and how the Colombian shipment is being downloaded from large ships in our rías. Interesting to read that one very long and powerful – 900HP – boat has been converted into a training vessel.

Galician women(Galegas) are renowned for being tough. In the worst cases, bossy(mandona) and stubborn(obstinada). Well, it’s long been a matriarchal society, reflecting the absence of husbands at sea. One such lady featured in the DdP this week. Aged 80, she’s been driving without a licence and ITV papers for 58 years. Naturally, she’s been nicked and fined at least twice but insists she’s going to continue driving illegally. Admirable or dangerous? Or both?

Well, I went to the Xunta office yesterday and got my Chave(Llave)365, useful for online healthcare dealings. My appointment was at 12 noon and – expecting a longish wait – I’d taken reading matter. Astonishingly, they weren’t operating the system of giving everyone in the 12.00-13.00 slot the same 12.00 time and I was, in fact, the only person there. As ever in my experience, the funcionaria was very civil and efficient. Not for me this – I’m told – rather more usual treatment.

A reminder: Since February 1, Spain recognises only vaccination certificates that prove that the holder has completed the primary vaccination within the last 270 days. Persons who’ve been vaccinated more than 270 days(9 months) ago need to get a booster dose in order to be considered vaccinated and thus exempt from strict entry rules.

Germany 

A fascinating article below – Germany’s radical plans to reinvent the family.

The Way of the World 

Want to know about publishing in the Anglo world these days? Then read this, and weep.

Finally . . . 

When going to a friend’s Wotsap page using the first 2 letters of her name, I noted that below her address was someone/something called Javi Alaba Fun Parlour. This turned out to a firm of funeral directors. Which was a surprise.

Call me naive but I didn’t know that Twitter permits pornography. I discovered this by (mistakenly) searching for Vigo, not #Vigo.

For new reader(s): If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city there.

THE ARTICLE  

Germany’s radical plans to reinvent the family. Olaf Scholz campaigned as a cautious heir to Merkel but has a raft of ideas to re-engineer society: Oliver Moody,  The Times

In 2010 The Economist published a front page depicting David Cameron with a warlike Union Jack mohican under the headline: “Broken Britain – The West’s most reckless regime?” The notion of Cameron as some sort of punkish sans culottes serves as a cautionary tale about hyping centrist leaders as revolutionaries.

Nowhere is this usually more true than in modern Germany, where political change often unfolds over an almost geological timescale. Angela Merkel’s 16-year rule was punctuated by a series of external shocks — the financial crisis, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the mass migration of 2015, the pandemic — that masked a remarkable degree of domestic and economic continuity.

No one would confuse Olaf Scholz, her Social Democratic successor, with Sid Vicious. On the campaign trail he took on the role of Merkel’s slightly more left-wing heir, even imitating her distinctive rhombus hand gesture of reassurance. His coalition’s agenda for government, however, tells quite a different story. Germany is heading into a phase of industrial upheaval as it switches nearly 40% of its electricity generation from coal and atomic power to renewables, and moves away from GDP as the defining index of economic performance towards a basket of measures such as carbon emissions, education and social inequality.

What gets less attention is the coalition’s programme for German society, which amounts to the most ambitious package of social reforms in half a century. These include allowing anyone over the age of 14 to formally change their gender by simply signing a form; liberalising immigration laws; offering dual citizenship to non-Europeans; lifting a ban on online information about abortions; legalising recreational cannabis consumption; and reducing the voting age from 18 to 16.

The most intriguing proposal is a reinvention of the idea of the family. The coalition argues that the present law is no longer fit for the 21st century. If a lesbian couple has a baby, for example, only the child’s biological mother is automatically recognised as its parent; her partner must officially adopt the baby to count as its second mother. Yet the plans go far beyond ironing out this kind of anomaly. The justice ministry is drawing up a new concept known as the Verantwortungsgemeinschaft, or community of responsibility. Under this system up to 4 adults would be allowed to assume basic parental rights, such as custody or guardianship, over a single child.

More adventurously, groups of Germans would be able to enter legally binding family-like arrangements with one another even when not bound by a romantic relationship or ties of blood. Should, say, 3 unrelated elderly neighbours decide to band together for practical reasons, they could gain mutual power of attorney, access to one another’s medical records, and other rights normally reserved for relatives.

It is possible to regard these transactional not-quite-family clusters as a latter-day liberal version of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”, the small units of association that form the building blocks of society. Yet some conservatives are horrified. Dorothee Bär, a prominent MP from the Bavarian Christian Social Union, has denounced the reform as a crushing attack on the institution of the family and the constitution.

One of the decisive questions over the next four years will be whether it is Scholz or Bär who is closer to the nub of public opinion on these matters. Political scientists such as Wolfgang Merkel often describe Germany as a “structurally conservative” society with an instinctive suspicion of sudden change and a strong attachment to tradition. To some extent this is borne out by opinion polls: the electorate is, for example, overwhelmingly opposed to giving 16-year-olds the vote. Yet there is also a case to be made that Scholz’s social reforms are simply catching up with the reality of life in an increasingly atomised liberal democracy that prizes individual freedoms. Germany has changed a great deal in recent years. Scarcely a decade ago, trans men and women were obliged to be sterilised or to divorce their spouses before they could formally change their gender. This now seems unthinkable.

The cultural power of Christianity is also waning: the German Catholic and Protestant churches are each losing about 400,000 members a year and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union has discussed dropping the word “Christian” from its title.

The acid test will be how voters respond to the coalition’s plans to turn Germany into a “diverse country of immigration”, including incentives for skilled migrant labour and a “coalition of the willing” with other EU states that would consider accepting a quota of asylum seekers.

Last autumn the arrival of only 11,000 non-European migrants by way of Belarus and Poland — barely a drop in the ocean compared to the 1.2 million who came in the 12 months after Merkel opened the borders in 2015 — prompted consternation. One survey at the time found that Germans felt more threatened by mass migration than any other sizeable developed country. Yesterday, though, fresh polling by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a liberal-leaning think tank, suggested the willingness to take in refugees had recovered to pre-2015 levels.

Both of these things can be true. Germany could well be on its way towards Scholz’s vision of a “diverse, tolerant and democratic civil society”, but parts of the country may not take kindly to being frogmarched down this road.