Cassandra Nash

The summer snake slithers away

By Euro Weekly News Media • Published: 27 Aug 2015 • 4:00

RAUL ROMEVA: Could insist on being the next president.

The day after

RAUL ROMEVA heads the unity list of pro-independence politicians put together by the regional president Artur Mas.
Both are committed to independence but belong to different parties and haven’t seen eye-to-eye in the past. As the first name on the list, Romeva could insist on being the next president, assuming the secessionists can form a government.
Romeva says there will be no conflict: “It doesn’t matter who is president after September 27,” he said. Will he feel the same on September 28?

SUMMER is an English-speaker’s silly season but Spain’s equivalent is a summer snake.

Snakes turn up in unexpected places during a Spanish summer and made headlines in more innocent times.

Innocence has fled but the name stuck and this summer’s snake is the Jorge Fernandez Diaz-Rodrigo Rato tryst which the Opposition is milking for all it is worth.

Much has been said by the Interior minister and the former vice-president regarding their conversation at the ministry but none of it sounds convincing.

Possibly Rato was asking for favours regarding his financial transgressions but all the garment-rending is a waste of time. Fernandez Diaz is now in position where he could do nothing to help even if he wanted.

Bad judgement

FELIPE RASCON, denounced on 30 occasions for gender abuse, was allowed to visit his seven-year-old daughter.

Because his separated wife was trying to stop the visits, he shot her and then killed himself.

Spain’s ministry of Justice new Public Safety law recently curtailed freedom of speech rights that the Spanish had begun to take for granted following Franco’s death.

Strange how it upholds those that are coherent only on paper.

A load of bull

KING FELIPE’S father Juan Carlos has largely retired from public life but recently called for more support for bullfighting, just as the public were forgetting that he likes to shoot elephants.

Spain has moved on and unlike the former king many no longer need to watch animals being slaughtered during the interval between siesta and dinner.