An article entitled “Socialists still rule at RTVE” in the ABC newspaper last week revealed that someone has been following the state-owned broadcaster’s coverage of the new government.
It mentions a report on the content of RTVE’s news broadcasts but doesn’t say who drew it up. The obvious suspect is the government itself – ABC is pro-PP – but there’s a lot of truth in what the report says. In fact, it was probably a government ploy to prepare the public for its plans to “reorganise” RTVE, details of which began to surface on Tuesday.
The report points out that RTVE has relentlessly presented the government’s cuts and other measures in a negative light and compares this with the never-ending honeymoon it had with the Zapatero government. I’ve actually been wondering about that because, as RTVE is state-owned, the most logical thing would be for it to make the government look good and the opposition bad. This no doubt will start happening when the government gets round to appointing “one of its own” to direct RTVE.
The article also mentioned RTVE’s huge coverage of the so-called Gürtel corruption case for which former (PP) Valencia regional premier Francisco Camps spent five days in the dock in court last week. Yet there’s hardly been a peep about the ERE corruption case in Sevilla in which multi-million subsidies intended to help struggling companies to solve staff reduction problems seem to have been diverted into lots of Socialist pockets for the past 10 years. The case surfaced a year ago but it is only now that details about all its ramifications are coming out.
The two cases are similar in that they illustrate how the party ruling a region takes advantage of its majority to distribute money, juicy contracts and favours to its sympathisers. Valencia hasn’t always been governed by the PP. It was governed by the Socialists for its first 15 years as an “autonomous” region, until the PP won the 1995 election and has governed since then with absolute majorities. Since it was reported in February 2009 that then regional premier Francisco Camps had accepted four suits as a present from a tailor close to businessman Francisco Correa, accused of controlling an alleged criminal network, the press has been having a high old time. (Gürtel is the translation of correa which means belt). A lot of people, including myself, thought it was just another ploy to blacken the regional PP government and bring it down in last year's regional election – which Camps won with an even bigger majority. However, whether Camps paid for the suits, as he claims, or not is becoming increasingly irrelevant as details of the Valencia regional government’s bankruptcy emerge. And the man most to blame has to be Camps, who governed from 2003 until he resigned last July.
If the PP manages to unseat the Socialists in the March regional election, as predicted, we’ll be inundated with details about ERE, which I predict will make all other corruption cases look like child’s play. The Socialists have ruled Andalucia with comfortable majorities since 1981, and former premier Manual Chaves was often referred to as “king”. He was often in the news because of one relative or another being caught with their hands in the till. Zapatero made him third deputy PM a couple of years back when it was revealed the Junta de Andalucia had given a €10 million subsidy to a Huelva company which employed Chaves’s daughter as a legal adviser. His son is apparently mixed up with a favours-for-kickbacks at the company which runs the public markets in Sevilla. His successor, Jose Antonio Griñan, now faces an election for the first time on March 25th and is desperate to keep the ERE scandal under wraps until then. However, some of the cats are already out of the bag and there are probably a million more lurking inside it.
Turning back the clock
The Church hierarchy seems to have swallowed the Socialist propaganda that the Partido Popular is Franco’s political heir. As a result, it has been increasingly vocal about gays and women, and now the Archbishop of Valladolid thinks deputy PM Soraya Saenz de Santamaria is not a suitable choice to make the opening speech at the Valladolid feria in April – because she didn’t get married in church. Get real, Archbishop. Go talk to a few parish priests – open your eyes to the realities of the 21st century.
By Muriel Pilkington. The local voice
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