My sincere congratulations to nuestros hermanos, to whom I have a secret debt of gratitude! Unlike the portuguese all star team of prima-donnas, the spanish team did deserve to win the 2008 Euro cup in Football.
The spanish society has a dinamism that as their iberian neighbour I cannot but envy. I wish Portugal could be a bit more like Spain, (except in architecture, which is really awful in Spain). Above all I wish that my fellow citizens could be a little less conformists and fatalists and a little more like the unconformist spaniards.
Under the progressive government lead by Zapatero, Spain:
- started facing the past and assessing the tragic legacy of the Civil War and the fascist regime,
- removed all statues of the bloody dictator Francisco Franco from its streets,
- forbade any nationalist rally at the tomb of the dictator, the infamous Valle de los Caidos, constructed by enslaved republican prisoners;
- challenged the all mighty power of the Catholic Church and that religious mafia called Opus Dei;
- recognized the legitimacy of the claim to equality among gay people and heterosexuals, by extending the right to marriage to same sex couples;
- took measures to fight the plague of violence agains women;
- welcomed thousands of immigrants who thus got the chance to improve their lives, including thousands of portuguese workers of all social strata and levels of qualification, and thousand of former illegal immigrants in Portugal, thus relieving the portuguese society of a major social crisis by absorbing the unemployed and over-exployted portuguese labour force..
Madrid is nowadays a vibrant cosmopolitan city worth visiting (albeit not even half as beautiful as Lisbon:-))
I just regret the idiot hostile atitude that the spanish government took against Kosova, and I regret it not only because it is not fair, but also because this atitude is not coherent with the progressive internal policies Zapatero has been introducing with great courage. Zapatero is facing the spanish right wing conservative and fascist bullies with no hesitation, yet, by supporting Serbia’s claims over Kosovo, he is doing nothing else but supporting the kind of people that he fights at home. How can one compare a country with a wide degree of decentralization and real regional authonomy with the case of Serbia under Kostunica and Tadic??? Can someone imagine Tadic’s daugher (if he has one) marrying an albanian??? Well, Cristina of Bourbon, the King’s younger daughter is married to a basque, Enaki Urgandarin.
Here is a nice text about the major sterotipes of identity that divide the spanish and the portuguese. (available in portuguese only).
Photos: First and third: Ayamonte, on the left bank of the Guadiana, facing the portuguese town of Vila real de Santo António… the place to go if you like paella, calamares or shrimps; second photo: young dentists in Madrid distributing leaflets to the population, demanding that the public heath system integrates their services. All of them were taken by myself. Please don’t copy them (it’s up to your councience).
