Jim Lawley

Yolanda Díaz, one of Spain’s deputy prime ministers, raised eyebrows during last summer’s election campaign when she arranged to be filmed doing the ironing. ‘I love ironing’, she announced virtuously. ‘I spend hours, almost every day ironing’, she went on, warming to her theme. ‘When I get home from work’, she concluded with evident self-satisfaction, ‘I iron my clothes and everyone else’s.’ Now the 52-year-old Labour Minister in Spain’s minority left-wing government has irritated even more people by suggesting that the nation’s restaurants should close earlier: ‘It’s madness to carry on extending opening times; a restaurant still open at 1 o’clock in the morning is not reasonable’, she declared.

In Spain’s general election last July, the right-wing Partido Popular and the even more right-wing Vox won 170 seats, just short of the 176 they needed to form a government. The support of an MP from Navarre and another from the Canary Islands took them to 172 but that only added to the frustrating sense of ‘so near and yet so far’.   60 per cent of Catalans say there is too much immigration Then Pedro Sánchez, the incumbent left-wing prime minister, stepped in, cobbled together an alliance with six other parties and, with 179 votes, was duly re-elected.

An upright Englishman, some years after marrying into a Spanish family, finally breaks his cardinal rule. In a moment of sudden daring at an extended family lunch, he challenges the totem of the Spanish renaissance: the Euro. The stunned silence that follows this blasphemy is filled by one of his in-laws: ‘Aha! Just what I expected... I know exactly what you are... You’re an euroescéptico!’ ‘Eh-oo-ro-es-THEP-ti-co’, she repeats slowly, each of the seven syllables a hammer blow to the poor Englishman’s standing. As this scene from the novel Spanish Practices suggests, the Spanish people’s faith in the European Union is often as blind as it is widespread – not a breath of criticism is permitted.

In 2017 the Catalan premier, Carles Puigdemont, having first organised an illegal referendum and then declared unilateral independence from Spain, escaped arrest by hiding in the boot of a car. While other Catalan leaders went to prison for sedition, Puigdemont fled to Belgium where he’s spent most of the last six years living comfortably in self-imposed exile. Now he’s preparing to make a triumphant return to Spain as a free man. The socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, who has just been officially re-elected, has granted an amnesty to Puigdemont and hundreds of others facing fines and imprisonment for their part in that push for independence. Sánchez had previously promised the Spanish people that such an amnesty was impossible.

Life expectancy in Spain is 83 years – amongst the highest in the world. Deep, trusting relationships with family and friends surely contribute to this longevity. Orwell emphasised the ‘essential decency’ of the Spanish people, ‘above all, their straightforwardness and generosity. A Spaniard’s generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times almost embarrassing … And beyond this, there is generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising circumstances.

If Spain’s left-wing government loses tomorrow’s general election, thousands of people including many senior civil servants stand to lose their jobs. Their positions are discretionary; if the political masters change, so do the personnel. When the left took office in 2018, for example, an estimated 6,000 public servants were fired, including several hundred advisers. The incoming Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez also put trusted supporters in charge of the state-run broadcasting company, the Paradors (a chain of state-owned hotels) and the social research organisation that organises opinion polls. Not surprisingly, its polls have been biased to the left ever since.

Vox, the most right-wing of Spain’s mainstream political parties, has emerged considerably strengthened from Sunday’s local and regional elections. With the left-wing vote slumping badly, the Partido Popular, the largest right-wing party, also had an excellent night, but crucially it will need the support of Vox to govern in many regions and town halls.          These elections then suggest that Vox may be a highly influential (albeit junior) partner in the central government after the general election which, it has just been announced, will be held on 23 July. At present it is the third-strongest party in the national parliament with 52 of the 350 seats, while the Partido Popular is the second-strongest with 88 seats.