Expats win Spanish council seats

[Aptrgangr]

Expats win Spanish council seats

By Danny Wood
BBC News, Madrid

Expatriates living in Spain have done well in local elections, winning council seats for their own independent political parties.



Mick Blake (left) is vice-president of one of the expat-dominated parties

In some councils in the province of Alicante, these new political groups won as many seats as the mainstream Spanish parties in Sunday's poll.

Many of the successful candidates are British. They campaigned on issues like corruption in urban planning.

San Fulgencio and Rojales were among the towns where they did well.

The Independent Mediterranean Alliance, AIM, received more than 20% of the ballots cast in San Fulgencio, winning as many seats as the Socialists and the Popular Party, Spain's biggest mainstream parties.

AIM's vice-president, Mick Blake, says his group should have enough power to reduce urban planning excesses.

In the town hall of Rojales, Grip, another new political party dominated by expatriates, won 15% of the vote.

Expat politicians are pleased with the results but say they could have fared even better if there had been higher voter turnout among non-Spanish European residents.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Expats win Spanish council seats


What the heck is this?

[Milesian]

Revenge for the Armada?

[Menydh]

There is a saying here: "there is a Saint Martin's Day for every pig"

Saint Martin's Day is the traditional day for the killing of porks.

[Errigal]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

The good news at least is the author of that book decides his son should stay in England rather than emigrate (according to a comment I read at Amazon).

Edit:

I should add that the emigration talk has been around England for a very long time. Check out this quote from a famous speech by Enoch Powell made in 1968:

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalized industries. After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: 'If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country.' I made some deprecatory reply, to the effect that even this Government wouldn't last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: 'I have three children, all of them have been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them settled overseas. In this country in fifteen or twenty years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.'

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that this country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

source

(The speech is well worth reading in full.)