AURELIO - REPORT FROM SPAIN

The Pandemic in Spain

We are here, in this the most western part of Europe, living through difficult days, as they are in the rest of the world. Spain was one of the first countries in Europe to suffer from the Pandemic, and consequently it took the Public Authorities a few days to gauge its importance. However, we learned something from what Italy was experiencing, and the Government decreed the State of Alarm on March the 14th . Since then it has been taking the measures that the experts advised and those that the health situation of the country has been requiring.
During these 22 days, (I am writing on April 5) the pandemic has affected more than 130,000 people in Spain, with more than 12,000 deaths and more than 38,000 recovered. After Italy, we are, so far, the most hardly struck country un Europe.  It is considered that we are reaching the peak of the expansion and that in the next few days a gradual decrease in cases will clearly begin. These are the essential figures for today. 
But let's put the focus on three fields worth of attention: first, on  how the Coronavirus is affecting the political structures that constitute our institutional building, Municipalities, Autonomous Communities, State, European Union, second on how the productive fabric is suffering the attack and how can be recomposed afterwards and with what changes, and third, on how our assumed values are being challenged and how they  will change due to this collective experience.  Nobody doubts that this pandemic will profoundly affect how political and economic priorities are organised within our country, and how we will come out of it being different from how we went in.
It took the government ten or twelve days to assume the importance of the invasion. Not too long a time if we compare it with other countries, but perhaps too long, in view of the speed and intensity with which the expansion took place. But since the declaration of the State of Alarm, following the constitutional path, the Government has been decreeing and implementing without much error the relevant measures advised by WHO and an ad hoc committee of experts established from that moment to advise the public authorities. The response of the Autonomous Communities has been different. Thus, the leaders of the Autonomous Communities of Madrid, Andalusia and Murcia, governed by the new generation of the Spanish Right, with the support of the Ultra-Right (which has been growing very significantly since the political crisis that ended the People's Party government, more than a year ago, and which has 52 deputies in Congress), responded, at first, by following what they considered most useful to their political interests, without ceasing to act in the face of the pandemic as a pretext for weakening the Government.

After the first extension of the State of Alarm, and in view of the citizen response, these Communities have assumed, with some reluctance, the general guidelines of action that the government has been setting.  The Autonomous Communities with strong nationalist weight, such as the Basque Country, and in an exacerbated manner Catalonia, also began with very serious resistance to the initiative of the Central Government, although the Basque Country, where the Basque Nationalist Party governs with socialist support, soon managed to bring itself into line with the Central Government, while the government of Catalonia has continued to use the epidemic to seek ways of affirming its will for independence... But here too, the citizen's response has ended up greatly moderating the initial rebellion of the government of the "independentistas".
Much more active and effective is the action of the municipal entities that throughout the Spanish territory have followed and sometimes anticipated the central government with measures of protection and attention to the most vulnerable sectors, by age, or by economic condition.
The citizen's response has been exemplary. Tough confinement measures have been carried out with genuine discipline and a sense of solidarity. There are forty-seven million Spaniards who have reduced their mobility by 92%, and they follow with a real sense of responsibility all the advice and regulations made public through a permanent communication activity carried out by public entities through the media.
For fifteen days ending on April 9, the Spanish business network has suffered, with no exceptions, a paralysis of all non-essential activity. Only agricultural and livestock companies, transport of basic goods, pharmacies, press outlets, print media companies, television and radio, industries producing medical equipment, maintenance, insurance, energy products, gas and electricity, water supply, and those others deemed necessary to effectively maintain services that allow  the confinement can be maintained without detriment to the usual needs of food and comfort can go on working, some of them with reinforcements.
In Spain, the action of the Armed Forces to protect the normal flow of raw materials, disinfect spaces, create field hospitals, or even manufacture hospitals in spaces previously used for fairs or sports, has helped to further consolidate the emotional bond between them and Spanish society, a bond that was already beginning to be very solid due to the prestige that these Armed Forces had been obtaining in their actions in the service of the United Nations or the European Union,  in the international sphere and for the actions that the Military Emergency Unit has been carrying out within the national territory, a development of the Army that was born in 2005 and that has been acting, with Firemen and Civil Protection, in all the natural disasters, floods, fires or earthquakes that the Spanish have suffered during these years.  And it is not insignificant to underline this fact, when we are referring to a country where the divorce between the Armed Forces and society had been very deep during the forty years of the dictatorship.
The national police and the regional and municipal police forces were placed, by virtue of the Decree Law on the State of Alarm, under the sole command of the Ministry of the Interior, and have thus been functioning effectively since day one.
But it is the citizen's response that must be stressed. Once again Spanish society is showing its responsible and supportive condition. Neither in the big cities, nor in the small ones, nor in the prisons, nor in the business environment have there been acts contrary to the given regulations. The crime rate has decreased with mobility, and the rules of confinement have not had any collective challenge of the least importance.
However, it is painful to note that the attitude in Europe of some representatives of the countries of the North, who, in keeping with their tradition of contempt for the South, have so far prevented a European reaction to the Pandemic, at the level that such a challenge imposes on the Union's institutions, is not without its iritation. The response of the European Central Bank is considered to be positive, but insufficient, and the Commission's most recent moves are welcomed with hope. But the recovery bonds are felt to be an indispensable instrument that proves the solidarity between nations that should characterise the Union, and much more proactive measures on the part of the Commission, and above all the Council, are lacking. In the European Parliament, the intervention of the Spanish PP Member of Parliament, Esteban González Pons on 28 March expressed the feelings of the entire Spanish nation when he criticised the fact that the European Union was incapable of reaching an agreement to tackle the coronavirus health crisis and lamented the fact that there were "two different Europes: that of the Council which is meeting this afternoon and that which every night at 8pm goes out onto the balconies to applaud the doctors and nurses of Europe".
The MEP says that the Parliament "must belong to the Europe which, despite being confined, speaks the same language from balcony to balcony, and not to that other one which, despite having translators, is unable to understand each other".
At the end of his speech, González Pons reminded us that "the generation that is suffering most from the virus is the generation of the fathers of Europe". "It is attacking the generation that was born in the post-war period, the one that built the European economy, the one that generalized public health and public education, the generation that returned democracy to Spain, Portugal and Greece, the one that knocked down the Berlin Wall, the one that renounced the franc and the framework in favor of the euro. The least they deserve is for us to show them that Europe is there when they need it and that it is true.
Spanish society is reaffirming its Europeanist vocation and continues to expect the Union's institutions to respond to its historic commitment.
And it is not idle either to remember that Humanity has suffered many pandemics and all of them have altered the line of History. Justinian's Plague destroyed the classical world in the sixth century, the black plague of the fourteenth century preluded the depletion of the Renaissance, the Spanish flu of 1918 was the mother of the Roaring Twenties, and of the advent of the Fascisms, and this will undoubtedly have decisive consequences on our way of life, on our scale of values. Pandemics not only take millions of lives, they also cause institutions, beliefs and structures that we thought were solid to disappear, to fall apart, and scales of values to be recomposed. At present, this Global Pandemic will bury many of the premises on which the neoliberal response was based, which since the 1970s has been building a financial system as ethereal as it is volatile, as destructive of bonds and guarantees of life in common as a manufacturer of an explosion of consumption and lack of solidarity. Societies will be more willing to rebuild the foundations of the welfare state where it already existed, and to build on it.
In the present, this Global Pandemic will bury many of the premises on which the neoliberal response was based,  an economical and deeply individualistic ideology which since the 1970s has been building a financial system not based  on production but speculation, as ethereal as it is volatile,  in fact destructive of bonds and guarantees of life in common, and the very efficient manufacturer of an explosion of consumption installed on lack of solidarity.
Societies will be more willing to rebuild the foundations of the welfare state where it already existed, and to build it ex novo where they did not know it. And the fear of a rebirth of authoritarianism should not be dismissed, so that very solid foundations are built to guarantee a freedom that is not that of the Jungle.  That is the challenge.  The entire world will have to meet it, and Europe will either emerge from it stronger and more consolidated or it will enter a crisis with no return.
Aurelio Valencia, Spain - 05 April 2020