The Two Per Cent Solution

Donald Trump took a swing at Spain last week, describing this country to (for some reason) the Finnish prime minister as being behind on its military spending. The American agency AP reports that Trump told Alexander Stubb in a meeting at the Oval Office that “You people are going to have to start speaking to Spain. You’re gonna have to call them and find out why they are a laggard. They have no excuse not to do this, but that’s all right. Maybe you should throw them out of Nato, frankly”.

In fact, Spain spends just 2% of its GDP on defence. The recommended level in these difficult times is 5%. The arms manufacturers would probably agree with this figure.

The leader of the Partido Popular Alberto Núñez Feijóo says he would raise the spending accordingly if the party were to win an election (the next one, all being well, is planned for 2027). He says: "The problem isn't Spain; the problem is Pedro Sánchez. Spain has always been a reliable and credible partner within Nato, and it will continue to be so".

This at the same time as lowering taxes for the wealthy and – inevitably – reducing spending in public health, wages and pensions.

Spain joined Nato (they call it the OTAN) back in May 1982. In those days, the people had been largely against joining (except that nobody had asked them) until Felipe Gonzalez agreed four years later to hold a referendum on the subject and then, surprisingly, performed an ideological flip and told his bemused supporters that ‘We must say ‘Yes’’ – apparently because he was worried that Morocco might have taken the opportunity to annex Melilla and Ceuta (with its current combined population of 160,000 souls).  

The question asked was "The Government considers it convenient, for national interests, for Spain to remain in the Atlantic Alliance, and agrees that such permanence be established in the following terms: (1) Non-incorporation into Nato's military structure; (2) Prohibition on the installation, storage or entry of nuclear weapons on Spanish territory; (3) Gradual reduction of the United States' military presence in Spain. Question: In your view, should Spain continue to be a member of the Atlantic Alliance subject to the terms agreed by the national Government?" Around 57% of those who understood the question answered with a resounding ‘Sí’.

Membership of Nato is getting expensive and while 2% is a commendable figure (how does one say ‘I surrender’ in Russian?), 5% is certainly way over the limit. A Guardian article from June this year says ‘Spain rejects Nato plan for member states to spend 5% of GDP on defence. PM Pedro Sánchez says he wants a more flexible formula that would make the target optional or allow Madrid to opt out’.

In broad terms, the farther left one goes, the louder is the call to leave Nato. The Izquierda Unida, for example, says: ‘We encourage Trump to accelerate Spain's expulsion from Nato and the withdrawal of its two military bases’. That’s right, the US military bases in Morón de la Frontera (air-force base) and Rota (naval base), in the provinces of Seville and Cádiz respectively. Mind you, there’s always Gibraltar and the Lajes base in the Azores if needs must. The leftie Diario-Red wants another referendum on Nato, which would, with little doubt, achieve nothing. Vox on the other extreme says that Sánchez with his short-term savings is ‘seriously harming our national security’.

In the middle, we think 2% sounds about right and we hope that neither the USA or indeed the Russians will (violently) disagree with us.

How dangerous is the world in 2025? Ben Hodges, the former US Army chief in Europe: "We are naive if we believe war will never touch Spain", he says.

But what about a future Nato without the USA? It wouldn’t be good says the CNN: ‘Europe is staring down the barrel of a stark new reality where the United States being the backbone of Nato – the alliance that has guaranteed the continent’s security for almost 80 years – is no longer a given…’ it adds: ‘But Nato without the US is far from impotent, with more than a million troops and modern weaponry at its disposal from the 31 other countries in the alliance. It also has the wealth and technological knowhow to defend itself without the US, analysts say’.

Phew! You had me worried there for a moment.

The Nobel Peace Prize (plus some also-rans)

Oddly, not everyone is happy with the choice from the five members of ‘den norske Nobelkomité’ for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. As you must already know, it went to the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado "for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy".

She’s the current thorn in Nicolas Maduro’s hide. She’s popular, supported by many foreign powers as the energy behind Venezuela’s slightly ridiculous candidate for president, the doddery Edmundo González, and she lives in fear of being arrested by Maduro’s thugs.

The Magats and their leader Donald Trump are of course furious that the prize wasn’t awarded to humankind’s finest example – after all, he has resolved a dozen wars already.

On Friday, following the announcement, the White House blasted the Nobel Committee for not awarding the Peace Prize to Trump (says the BBC), noting that ‘…Trump has been outspoken about his desire for the award, taking credit for ending several global conflicts. He regularly brought it up, including during his address to the UN General Assembly in September’.

I think many of us would have blown a fuse if Donald Trump had of been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (even if it might balance the choice of Barack Obama back in 2009).

Even odder than Trump’s rage at being thus slighted, we also heard from Politico that ‘Donald Trump deserved the Nobel prize, says Vladimir Putin’ (Yikes!). ‘…The Russian president insisted that the Nobel committee has lost credibility’. 

Thanks for that mate, says Donald: ‘The US President expressed his gratitude to Putin for his recent public support for his Nobel Peace Prize bid’.

That’s right, you couldn’t make it up.

Indeed, here’s María on Friday (she knows on which side of her toast has the butter) on  accepting the honour: “I dedicate my Nobel Prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”. 

María Corina Machado may be a popular choice, but she is also something of a handful. A Vox video on YouTube has her speaking – via video-link – to a recent meeting of the Patriots for Europe in Madrid:

"Dear presidents, dear Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox and organizer of Europa Viva, dear friends of freedom. From Venezuela I want to send my warmest greetings to each one of you, our great friends from Vox and Patriots for Europe…”

Personally, I’ll take vanilla.

Some other candidates who lost out to María include Francesca Albanese, plus Elon Musk, Donald Trump and some other luminaries who haven’t made it onto my radar.

Two candidates missing from the official list were the magnificent Greta Thunberg and Spain’s Pedro Sánchez. Either one would have been a better choice.

I'm Staying Home This Time

I’ve always been a big fan of the United States of America. I’ve spent a total of at least three years there during my life so far and have been to most of the 50 states (the remaining ones are too cold, too small or too hard to reach).

Plus three months in Washington DC, which for some reason is its own territory.

I was married to a wonderful woman from California whose parents, like mine, settled in Spain in the sixties, and we had thirty years together before she died. We have three children – two of whom are now living in the American mid-west (the third one stayed home here in España).

I was brought up (until I was thirteen) in Norfolk UK, near an American airbase. My parents were friendly with some of the officers, and I would be gifted (sic) lots of comic books (I was one of the earliest British fans of Batman, Superman and Casper the Friendly Ghost). Then came books (with writers like Jack Schaefer, Zane Grey and O. Henry), peanut butter and Hershey Bars.

From the age of nine onwards, I knew that I wanted to spend as much time as I could in America. Those cars!

Studying in Seville when I was seventeen, I took college entrance exams, and was all ready to go, when some friends of my parents warned them (erroneously, I’m sure) that I would end up in Vietnam being shot at by fellows wearing black pyjamas.

I finally crossed ‘el charco’ in 1974, arriving in Florida to stay with the Franzen boys in Pompano Beach – a place with no pavements, bad colour television, beautiful girls and amazing cocktails. Gayne and Ted’s parents were neighbours of my family in Spain. I remember to this day consuming my first Whopper.

I love the opportunity that the USA offers, plus the enormous and sparsely populated hinterland. My two kids live in a state that is 40% larger than the whole of Spain.

I’m a huge fan of American culture: its writers, musicians and artists who have brought so much pleasure to the world. 

Nowadays, I tend to go every November and visit the grandchildren, the local Wal-Mart and the breathtaking countryside (when I can afford to) and to eat the Thanksgiving turkey, but I shan’t be going this year.

Sadly, the USA that I know and love is undergoing a Once in a Hundred Year collapse (think the October Revolution or Brexit) thanks to the insidious MAGA philosophy. I can put up (more or less) with the guns and the iced tea, but Donald Trump’s second term, surrounded as he is this time with people who are evidently even thicker and nastier that him (mostly fished from the water treatment plant of Fox News) is for me a step too far.

There’s Pete Hegseth with his alarming Christian tattoos and his alleged love for a bottle of scotch who runs the reassuringly renamed ‘Department of War’. The worm-brained Robert Kennedy: the ludicrous secretary of health who doesn’t believe (‘believe’!) in vaccinations. Kristi Noem is the Secretary for Homeland Security – she’s the one who wants to deport all the Latin farmworkers with her reprehensible (and masked) ICE goons (she’s best known for shooting her puppy because it wouldn’t ‘heel’). Then there’s the top two officials at the FBI, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who between them have no previous experience at the law enforcement agency (Bongino used to be a far-right radio host). The eccentric Christian extremist Mike Huckabee is Trump’s ambassador to Israel… and so on: a plethora of the inept and dangerously appointed. Then there’re the current purges against ‘the radical left’ Democrat party – a damp and strangely feeble group that could kindly be described in European terms as centre-right. The late Charlie Kirk said of them: ‘the Dems believe everything God hates’.

Such a young country run by such old-fashioned conservative values!

Of course, I can still visit the USA (after all, I’m tall and pink and have a nice anglo-sounding name, plus I’m too old to be much of a nuisance anyway). Just remember not to say anything silly and make a point of glaring sternly at anyone who looks even slightly Latin.  

Anyway, I’ve decided. I’ll be staying home this year. I wish to avoid the minor threat of ending up in Alligator Alley or Guantánamo.

I’m told that I’m not the only one who thinks like this.

On the bedside table I’ve got Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to re-read.

All said, I’m pretty sure that I can manage just fine this year without a Hershey Bar.

The Property Ladder

Two points: there are a lot of people searching for a home – either to rent or to buy. Also, despite the apparent lack of available properties, Spain has more than 3.5 million vacant homes, representing some 14% of the total housing stock. Around half of these homes are in those smaller municipalities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.

I once shared an apartment in Seville with four other students, me and a British school-friend in bunks in what must have been a converted bathroom, with white tiles on the wall. The other three were studying at the university and came from Montefrío in Granada. The next term, I shared a three-bedroom 8,000 peseta apartment with two students.

It’s fine when you are young and running around the city all night - but not when that single room (share the kitchen and bathroom) costs 1,000€ a month.

We look at the problems of the renters and the buyers – but part of the whole must be the sellers, the landlords and the owners: having a property portfolio is good business.

This is partly why, following the covid when we all worked from home (often in a charming village two hours away from the city), they wanted us to return to the office: taxes, office blocks and city politics. My old mate Cheap Pete once told me (with his New Jersey accent) – for a million dollars you can buy a giant property in North Dacota or a parking lot in Washington DC. But you might wait a whole year to sell that beautiful mountain, or less than a day to sell the city plot.

Which one was the better investment? The second choice, but only if there’s a demand.

No wonder the property barons want to see a certain scarcity – prices (and profits) must go up. In Madrid, some old factories and warehouses, shops and abandoned outlets are now being switched to residential homes, or maybe into 1,000€ a bed-chamber with ‘coliving’ . There’s the advantage of city life, interesting flatmates and maybe a downstairs eatery, if your wallet can still manage the menu del día.

I live in a village on the coast. There’s a giant abandoned hotel taking up a chunk of the infrastructure. It was closed in 2008 and now belongs, for some reason, to the Madrid regional government. It could become fifty apartments. In the back of the next-door port of Garrucha, there’s a large unfinished block of flats, rotting in the sun and covered in graffiti. That’s another fifty potential homes. The scarcity then, is in the city – although there are still a fair number of empty residences even close to the Puerta del Sol.

Many of those who live in the city came from elsewhere, and they may still own a place in the country, a casa del pueblo they’ll visit during the summer or the local fiesta – maybe to show off their success, or perhaps just to take it easy for a while and share a noisy lunch with the cousin who stayed behind. Other people who own a couple of houses might leave one empty. One day the children will live there. Others still will rent, or sell, or turn it into an Airbnb, replace the sheets and towels, and create a cleaning job for Encarnación.

Digital nomads (doesn’t that sound fun?) will rent for a while, working from their laptop, while idly planning their next move to Khartoum or Bucharest. Foreigners will buy the house, and maybe the one next door, and try and put in a swimming pool. Others still will take the week-end option and then leave a cigarette burn in the mattress.

Maybe put in a security system (like it says on the telly) to defy the okupas.

Then there are the millions – apparently – of people who want to rent somewhere half decent for a little bit less than their entire salary, eating rusks and asking their parents for a few extra euros (until either the wage or the rent, whichever one comes first, is raised by a fraction). The Government talks of making (or building) more cheap homes or closing down illegal rentals, or helping the under-thirties buy a house in the smaller towns. Some local governments are considering forcing the sale of empty homes.

The Spanish Constitution Article 47 gives us all the right to una vivienda decente.

The influencers in their YouTube videos meanwhile are talking about investing in their wares (from their bases in low-tax Andorra), and one day soon, you too will be able to afford to buy and rent out houses out like the best robber landlords.

Gloomily, we read: Spain’s record housing market is far from peaking – ‘prices will reach unprecedented levels’. Hey, the higher the price, the happier the owner.

Maybe the foreign Vulture Funds will come and pick up another entire city block: they are here for the opportunities.

A left-wing politician sums up the problem: “People with money in this country invest in gold, the stock market, and real estate”. They buy in the city (Cheap Pete’s parking lot) or on the coast, leaving many thousands of Spanish municipalities by the wayside.

El País has a story about a thirty-year-old who has finally given up on Madrid and moved to the town of Ponferrada – in search of a quieter life, escaping job insecurity and housing prices. “Life moves on and priorities change,” he says blithely.

Then there any many people living in extreme poverty, or in shacks or under bridges. Local guiri Richard Gere may have the answer – he says in a TV interview that "My wife and I have set a goal to end homelessness in Spain within six years". I think that this may prove to be a larger challenge than he imagines. Caritas puts the number of the dispossessed at 37,000.

In all, there are 48 million people living in Spain and 27 million homes – which works out at a house for every 1.8 persons. That’s not so bad…

 

The Better Way to See Granada (is not to look)

A friend from Germany has been staying with me, and last Wednesday, along with my daughter and her husband (and my laptop), we drove up to Granada.

It’s just a couple of hours away, and it is without doubt Spain’s greatest city.

I’ve been many times over the years, but my son-in-law was born and raised there and knows all the oddest and most scenic spots – to say nothing of the best eateries and bars.

We started at a likely looking caff next to the Airbnb apartments we had reserved just off the city hall square. In many places in Granada, a drink comes with a tapa, but it will be something chosen by the house. We had three drinks (it’s thirsty work driving to Granada) and they came out with three plates – and if someone at the table doesn’t like baby octopus, then it’s all the more for me.

In the evening, we wandered down towards the river to admire a couple of fountains (my son-in-law assured me that, as a child, he had fallen into both of them on several occasions). Then, crossing vaguely south over the Río Geníl, we arrived at an outdoor café called ‘La Cuchara de Carmela (¿Donde mejor que aquí? they ask)’, which again decided what tapas we would be treated to. They also had a menu so we could add some more dishes to stand in for dinner.

We have all seen the sites over the years, gone to the flamenco shows in the Sacromonte and been approached by beggars outside the cathedral; indeed the first time I was in the Patio de los Leones in the Alhambra Palace, I was sixteen. I’ve even got the photo somewhere…

So, limited site-seeing this time, and maybe just a selfie or two.

There comes a time, after a few glasses of wine and a belly-full of food, when one must wander on to look for a jolly late-night joint for a schnapps or, um, a tequila!

We went to find an old mate called Sebastian, who used to run a place in Mojácar but has now moved to adventures new in the city. Seba, wearing a tatty-looking Mexican hat, greeted us with every sign of affection in his tiny bar, the Reina Linda. Margaritas and tacos ¡por favor!

The students are now returning to Granada, a university city, and the scruffy, cheaper places like this one do a good trade in the season. There’s nothing – I think you will agree – like writing your thesis or studying those heavy medical books armed with a lightly-chewed pencil and a cocktail.

The next morning, we dropped by to see the parents – mis consuegros – of my son in law. This time, in a residential and passingly more modern part of the city (there were plenty of blocks of apartments in the barrio with the arrows and yoke featured on the walls – that’s to say, built during the Franco years).

I’ll leave the parents in peace, save to note that the first bar, where we met the old dad, was the tiniest bar I have ever seen, crammed only with men, and with the shortest barman in the world. In fact, one has to lean over the counter to be sure that he is there at all.

Again, the tapas chosen by the kitchen were delicious.

And now, we are back in Mojácar, and my friend will soon be flying back to Germany for a few weeks before she returns.

Perhaps we shall do Córdoba then.