Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (29 page)

In the orange-blossom heat outside Valencia's cathedral, there are people who do not find that question hard at all. They are holding up a banner: ‘The Route of Waste'. Activists have organized a coach trip around all the various projects Valencia built in the good times. There is the Formula One racetrack, which was built right through the city so that the roads had to be redesigned. But the city has lost its Formula One race. There is the America's Cup dock, with huge sheds for ocean- going yachts and a massive white control tower. But there is no more America's Cup racing in Valencia. There is the Opera House, a cross between the one in Sydney and something by Gaudí on acid: €400 million to build, 40 million a year to run—fifteen performances a year. ‘Yes, I am proud of it,' says Xabi, one of the activists on the tour. ‘Yes, the architecture is spectacular. But I would rather have schools.'

Whether by corruption—and there has been a great deal of that—maladministration, or pure bad luck, Valencia is littered with vanity projects that tell their own story. The brand-new airport that has never seen a single plane land. The theme park built in a place where the summer heat rises above 40°C (104°F). The land bought at premium prices, which is now worthless.

The local press were also on the coach trip. And the next day I find out what they were working on. Headlines about me. According to these, the BBC's ‘star economics expert' has come to Valencia to pour scorn on their wonderful infrastructure projects. The story makes the national conservative daily
ABC,
and it doesn't stop there. Angry voices at the government's official weekly press conference demand: Why are the BBC here? Have you given them an interview? Will you give us an interview about what you told them in their interview?

‘It is Spain,' sighs Máximo Buch, the new financial controller of Valencia, when I finally get to meet him. Yes, Spain—where the arrival of the foreign media makes a nice story for the right-wing papers, but where massive white-elephant projects went unquestioned for a decade, and where the local banks that funded them, known as
cajas de
ahorro,
their boards stuffed with appointed politicians, have now gone bust. And where if you need some insulin from the health service, you had better hope you are the first in the queue.

Seville, Andalusia.
The Spanish version of the soprano cornet is tiny: it curls like a golden snail in the player's hand. There is only one valve, and it is tweaked, like a tap, so that the melody it produces swoops and squeals. In an English brass band there is only one soprano, whose job is to add a sweet echo, one octave higher, to the main melody. In the La Pasión Sevilla band, all the cornets are sopranos. In fact, between the massed ranks of burly working-class men playing their cornetas and the heavy drum detachment at the back, only a few trumpets and horns are present to add harmony and depth. The result, if you stand close as the band shuffles behind a statue of the Madonna through the humid alleyways of the old Triana district, is an aural mixture that is at the same time saccharine-sweet and physically painful.

By the summer of 2012, policymakers across Europe had reason to be thankful for Pasión Sevilla and its cornets, Triana with its statues and incense, the tight knots of local people gathered at the corners of tiny cobbled streets. Because family and tradition, religion, brass bands and social solidarity were all that was holding many communities in Spain together.

One in four adults was unemployed. Half of all young people were jobless. Consumer spending was in free fall, and the country had just learned that to save a single bank would add a third to its already sky-high national debt. Meanwhile its top-thirty listed companies had lost 40 per cent of their market value in a year. Spain was in trouble, on the face of it, because its small savings and loans banks, the
cajas,
fuelled an insane property boom that went bust. They didn't go in for complex structured finance deals, like Lehman Brothers; indeed they were the opposite of ‘Anglo-Saxon' capitalism, being small and locally owned.

But behind the purely economic story lies a more complex, political–economic crisis that threatens to send Spain the same way as Greece, shattering the eurozone in the process and placing the whole European project in grave doubt.

You can see how badly the crisis has hit people at the ‘Coralla Utopia' apartment block. It's a new, modern, five-storey complex next to a busy road. The flats are small: perfect for young professionals and their minimalist furniture. But the company that built the flats went broke, and now the whole place has been squatted by families turfed out of their own homes, due to repossession. Toni Rodríguez leads me around the darkened corridors (the electricity company has cut the power supply):

‘We had weekly meetings for four months and we realized we were all in the same situation, and finally we decided to do something about it. When we took over the building I was frightened, because I've seen things on TV where they drag people out. The banks need to adapt the mortgage system to avoid kicking people out of their homes.'

Toni is forty-four years old, her tanned and weathered skin marked by the kind of tattoos you do with some blue ink and your own needle. She's one of a tight group of women—mainly cleaning workers—who've organized the occupation. They all have children of working age who are unemployed. They resent the banks for evicting them and the politicians for bailing out the banks. Around the edges of the project move people from a completely different demographic: the so-called
indignados
of the 15M movement—anti-globalist youth with trade-mark tattoos and piercings. The
indignados
made world headlines after massive occupation protests in public squares in May 2011, in turn sparking the global Occupy movement.

When you see the Utopia flats, draped with banners announcing ‘no homes without people, no people without homes', you see what happens when official politics abandons people. Very ordinary, indeed anti-political people have begun to turn to Spain's radical youth for help. They in turn have found a purpose, here and elsewhere, outside mainstream politics, which they despise. For at the heart of Spain's economic problem is its political system. In the first place, there is the system of autonomous regions: Andalusia, like Valencia, is bankrupt and in need of a bailout. And on top of the regions, there is the highly politicized banks.

Bankia, the bank at the centre of the crisis, was created only in 2011, through a merger of seven troubled
cajas.
They pooled their debts, took bailout money from the government, sunk some of their bad debts into a government fund and sold shares in the merged company, appointing former IMF boss Rodrigo Rato as the CEO. What could go wrong?

As it turned out, Bankia was hiding bad debts that would need €24 billion to sort out. The two largest
cajas
that formed Bankia were both effectively controlled by politicians from the ruling Partido Popular. One has recently walked away with a €14 million payoff, despite presiding over the biggest bank collapse in Spanish history. Rato, the CEO, was officially charged with fraud after the
indignados
brought a class action to the same effect. When opposition politicians called for a parliamentary inquiry into the bank's collapse, the PP used its parliamentary majority to quash the proposal. Ditto any attempt to force Mr Rato to testify before a parliamentary committee.

Raúl Limón, the Seville-based political correspondent for the news-paper
El País,
told me:

‘The
cajas
were banks who used regular economic rules but with a political background—so it's like getting a politician to hold your money. That's a
caja.
So maybe the politicians should be answering questions in parliament—and maybe they should be on trial. They paid three or four times the true value of land. They demonstrated economic growth and people believed they used the
cajas
to enhance social well-being—we now know they were buying land and selling illusions.'

If Spain's banking crisis had happened in a sound economy, it might have been containable. But by mid-2012, Spain's debt was growing uncontrollably. It would need a bailout. And EU/IMF bailouts come with one condition: increased austerity.

In a place like Andalusia, austerity will fall hard on people. It's an underdeveloped region where, as in so much of euro-bolstered southern Europe, the biggest economic player is the state. The landscape is spectacular: the Sierra Nevada with its cowlicks of snow, even in summer, floats above rolling hillsides planted with olives, oranges and wheat. But there's a global olive-oil crisis: the regional government had to inject €62 million into olive-oil cooperatives to tide them over the collapse in prices. The regional unemployment rate is 30 per cent, and many farm labourers feel trapped by the current crisis, which, says Lola Alvarez, is just the intensification of a land crisis which is ‘always there'.

Lola is a union organizer at Somonte, a farm abandoned as unwork-able three years ago, which has now been squatted by some fifty people who are trying to revive it as an eco-farm. The directions to Somonte are ‘Drive to a certain kilometre marker and look out for the flags.' The flags, of course, display the face of Che Guevara. It's early, so the occupiers—who sleep nose to toe on the floor of two tiny farm buildings—are still stumbling into the ritual breakfast of black coffee and roll-ups that is the
indignado
's staple diet. Some are farm labourers, some itinerant anarchists, some both. Lola tells me:

‘Before the crisis, because of low pay on the land, the majority of farm workers switched to the construction sector. Their jobs were taken by migrants, and also by mechanization. Now that construction has collapsed, there's very little work on the land.'

But this is not yet a crisis of despair. Whereas in Greece, two years of rioting and political incompetence fuelled the rise of ‘anomic breakdown'—social rootlessness and hopelessness—Spain has gone the other way. People have clung to their families, their village roots, their religion (and their secondary religion, which is football). Many young people have formed protest camps. Their bible is Stéphane Hessel's
Indignez-vous!,
a plea for resistance against bank-controlled austerity, and for non-violence.

At the political level, for all the perennial fractiousness of Catalan and Basque politics, for all the allegations of corruption, the system is holding in a way that the Greek system did not. There is no rapid formation and fragmentation of parties; no collapse of elites into warring factions. But it could still happen. And Spanish people know better than anybody in Europe how nasty it can get if politics fails. On the Somonte farm, out of the blue, the occupiers are buzzed by men flying powered microlites. It's a joke at first, until they spot that two of the flyers are displaying Francoist flags, and realize that it's an airborne counter-protest.

Lola points to an old man sitting quietly at the edge of the group of farm workers. ‘That's my father,' she says. ‘In the Civil War the local landowners, Francoists, made him drink olive oil and eat grasshoppers to force him to vomit up the ”red” that was inside him. But don't ask him about it…' She draws two lines down her cheeks with stiff fingers. ‘He cannot tell the story without crying.'

Colmenar,
Andalusia.
‘Drive up this road until we meet Gordillo,' I tell the taxi driver outside Malaga airport, in broken Spanish. The only word he understands is Gordillo. We climb a narrow highway into the Sierra Nevada, the meter ticking satisfyingly towards a hundred bucks. Just where my phone's GPS tells me the demonstration should be, we spot flags in the distance, a procession and the flashing lights of police cars. ‘Gordillo!' says the taxi driver, beaming.

It's September now, and the landscape is turning crisp and brown. But the small streets of Colmenar—a farming town—are hot. With my luggage and my jacket and my absence of blood-curdling anarcho-syndicalist rhetoric, I cause a minor commotion as I work my way up the march to find Gordillo.

‘What the fuck is this asshole doing?' one old farm worker shouts. ‘Journalist,' I say, showing my DSLR camera.

‘Fuck journalists!' he shouts at me, and to his mates around him: ‘Fuck the journalists.'

‘Sindicato!' I call back, waving my NUJ card at them. They laugh, with their weather-cracked faces, and break into some kind of song that either means I am okay or that even unionized journalists are still the running dogs of capital.

In the tiny square of Colmenar, the marchers are receiving their rations: tortilla wraps and bottled water. They're a mixture of activists from the land workers union, some 15M-style youth—but not many—and unemployed people, including numerous women. At the corner of the square, looking dazed, stands Mayor Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo. He's wearing a neat Palestinian scarf and his face is sunburnt; with his gap tooth and wonky eye, the dehydration and exhaustion of the morning's march have left him looking slightly crazy.

Gordillo is mayor of the Andalusian town of Marinaleda, long a legendary place to the social movements for its decades-old communal way of managing the land and its crops. Now it's become legendary for something else: with Gordillo in attendance, the land workers union has begun expropriating food from supermarkets—using force on the odd occasion when the checkout people tried to stop them—and then distributing it to the unemployed.

Now Gordillo has launched this march from town to town, to lay down a marker of more civil disobedience against the austerity to come. Lola Alvarez, who I met on the Somonte farm, is here. Can it achieve anything, I ask? She points at the armada of police cars with their spinning lights. ‘We achieved this. They are terrified of us.' Another man chips in, one of the union leaders:

‘People don't want to hear about bonds, Merkel, European banks. They want to talk about the cost of a bottle of cooking gas, the cost of medicine, mortgages, work, expectations—and that's what this march is letting them do.'