A’ (fortune) hunting we shall go

MONTORO admitted to reporters soon after the Rato scandal broke that he failed to understand how someone as prominent as the ex-everything could have behaved as he did.
Spain’s Finance Minister was being ingenuous at best and disingenuous at worst. Rato behaved as he did because in the good old days no-one would have noticed what he was up to. And if anyone had noticed, it would have been hushed up and the scandal kept within a closed circle. It was bad luck from Rato’s point of view that because of the economic crisis, Montoro himself has been looking around for cash in the same way that someone who is hard-up scrabbles amongst the sofa cushions to find a euro or two. And when Rato’s hoard was located, it was too conspicuous to be overlooked or forgiven.

In transit
MANY who did not live through the Transition to democracy – particularly those who listen to Podemos and the more radical Catalan nationalists – regard it as a failure.
Too few were called to account, they claim, and insufficient reparation made for Franco’s victims and the destruction wrought by his regime.
That period was both an epilogue and prologue at a time when the apparently impossible happened: the past was not forgotten but neither was it dwelt upon.
The Transition-deniers should ask themselves what would have been the alternative to burying the past in the mid-seventies.
Reopened wounds, renewed bitterness and escalating conflict instead of one failed coup d’état a few years after the dictator’s death.

Double standards
SUSANA DIAZ, President-elect of the Andalucia region, pulled off a PSOE victory but not an overall majority.
While she has been trying to woo Podemos or Ciudadanos to facilitate her investiture, how many recall the PP government’s abortive attempt to introduce a law giving automatic victory to the most-voted party?
The PP has certainly consigned it to the litter bin now that it doesn’t suit Mariano Rajoy’s own supporters.
Futile to speculate whether it would have been resuscitated were their Andalucia candidate Juan Manuel Moreno now in Diaz’s position instead.