Trouble at mill

I wrote in a previous entry about my experience of voting in local elections here and how it was a much more direct kind of process than back home, with the votes being counted in front of you by people you know, the candidates including people you know, etc. In that post I mentioned that people tend to talk not about the party they're voting for but the person. Well recent, quite startling, political events locally have served to disavow any doubts I may have had as to the importance of the parties in people's thinking when they vote.

There has been, dear reader, serious trouble at the Town Hall. Now partly because feelings are running high and I prefer to present what's been happening as neutrally as possible, and partly because I simply don't know enough of the ins and outs to offer an opinion with any confidence, what I'm going to write here is merely what's happened as I understand it. It is not a view on who's right, wrong, crooked, straight, etc. I simply don't know.

I said at the time to think of the PP as the Conservatives, PSOE as Labour and BNG as a sort of Galician Plaid Cymru. BNG had retained the mayoralty by dint of working with PSOE in a council where no party had a majority. Therefore the incumbent mayor, a tall and loquacious chap by the name of Secundino Fernández, retained the role. Today, however, he was removed from that position in a motion of censure at a rowdy extraordinary council meeting. I'll come back to this meeting later. It seems that two of the three PSOE representatives have 'crossed the floor', voting with their PP counterparts to remove him from office and share the mayoralty for half each of what remains of the current electoral term.

This has been boiling for a while – it could have happened at a previous meeting but a frankly comical occurrence pushed it back. The remaining PSOE councillor, aware that in the absence of a PP councillor who was away on holiday she suddenly held the balance of the vote in her hands (this bit I may have wrong, for which I beg forgiveness from both her and anybody in Viana reading this if so), sprang to her feet mid-meeting and ran from the room shouting that her cows had escaped and she had to go and deal with them. (This bit I don't have wrong. Everybody in the village who wasn't at that meeting has seen the video!) This does not, I imagine, happen in too many councils back home.

Locals who are against the two who've crossed the floor, or are supporters of Secundino, have made their feelings clear. Stickers have appeared on bins, lamp-posts and walls around the village commenting on what's going on. Posters have been tied to bridges and fences. These posters and stickers say that the two have been paid to cross the floor – critics of the two say that their motivations are greed, not politics. BNG supporters say that the current administration's achievements are manifest. The PP and PSOE councillors counter that the mayor's style is dictatorial and he's impossible to work with. There's a large gulf between these two positions and it made for an extremely raucous pleno (meeting) as the deed was done at high noon today.

I don't know how many people attend a typical pleno. Some make a point of being at as many as possible, but the Casa de la Cultura where it's held is certainly not full for all of them. Today it was as packed as social distancing allowed, and some 250 people were viewing a live internet feed. A total of maybe 300 people viewing one way or another is the equivalent of a town of, say, Basingstoke's size having around 15,000 people attending a council meeting either in person or online. There were actual members of the press, both print and TV as far as I could see, in attendance.

I tuned in for a bit of it. My understanding of Gallego is still poor when it's noisy or more than one person is speaking at once, and both were the case here. A lot of shouting from an enraged audience and, according to a local barman this evening, police had to escort the two now party-less councillors concerned from the hall. (I don't know if this is true – I didn't see it.) This is all unprecedented locally.

So what now? This is the only bit on which I'm going to express an opinion. The next three years will see a mayor who represents no party now, then a PP mayor, in charge for one-and-a-half years each. I find it difficult to see how a mayor who has attracted such ire can govern effectively. This is a small town and political divisions in Spain generally, and in the pueblos in particular, can run deep. In the long run, I can only see the BNG coming out of it with a 'win', if such a thing can be gleaned from this crisis. While PP voters may not feel particularly strongly about it, anybody who voted PSOE will likely feel they've been disenfranchised. Vote PSOE, get PP is unlikely to go down well with them and in circumstances like this the electorate usually punish the party concerned. Remember the Lib Dems' vote collapsing completely after they got into bed with the Tories?

PSOE voters are not, I suspect, likely to vote PP in future. They may simply not vote of course, but the likely destination of many of those votes, if anywhere, is the BNG. We're only talking about 540-odd votes so a couple of hundred either way can make a huge difference to the make-up of the council here.

What times we live in. Cantankerous cows, COVID and Council chaos – what the hell else has 2020 got up its sleeve?

Cowpats and conviviality

Pretty much no matter how small your community is in Spain, you can usually be reasonably confident that there's somewhere even smaller not too far away. I've seen news items here which have featured a single, usually elderly, person being the last remaining inhabitant of some minuscule settlement. Everybody else has either left or died, the population slowly eroding to one last man or woman, who has no reason to leave their lifelong home.

Castiñeira is not quite that, but it's much smaller than Viana. This tiny hamlet sits near the very top of the local mountains - the drive there is uphill absolutely all the way. There are no shops, nowhere to drink other than the local residents' association bar in the room of a house, and no pubic transport there. Its small size has not stopped it holding its own fiesta, though, and we were invited yesterday to attend this celebration and have a bit of lunch at the house of a friend who comes from there but, fairly typically, has moved away - in his case to London.

Its altitude gives it some stunning views over the valleys below. It's quite a pretty place itself, with stone houses on steeply angled and narrow streets, all sitting right in the middle of the land which the people who live there farm for their living. Sheep and cattle regard you with cool indifference from behind dry-stone walls as you pick your way around, and the cows have left the usual tell-tale signs of their presence pretty much everywhere.

The event comprised a 20-litre tub of sangria and a visiting three-piece laid on to provide the music. 'Style', led by a chap who looked quite startlingly like Armando Iannucci, and evidently used to entertaining small gatherings like this, were taking no chances; they'd brought their own applause, cleverly hiding hundreds of fans within the speakers to reliably mark the end of each song. Their stage was quite literally the back of a van, the side dropped down to reveal the entire set. Our man Armando was quite a musician, somehow managing to play piano, drums, bagpipes, castanets and violin despite appearing to have only a digital keyboard in front of him.

However, what they lacked in spectacle they more than made up for with volume and an absolute certainty as to which music was required. At first, everybody just stood there under a hot sun and looked at them, and I thought it was going to be a bit awkward to be honest. However, just a couple of songs in, two things started to work their magic. First, the free sangria. Second, much more importantly, the Spaniards' almost compulsive desire to dance. Soon much of the crowd, which numbered the majority of the population of the village, was doing the Paso Doble to a string of what I've already seen during multiple visits to Galicia, are old favourites.

Slowly, though, the crowd started to drift away in twos and threes - past 3pm, lunchtime was at hand. A few non-verbal signals essentially told the band to knock it on the head for now, and we went to our friend's family's house for the standard four-course, far-too-much-food, stuff-yourself-to-the-gunnels-and-then-burn-it-off-with-home-brewed-fire-water lunch which marks these August holidays.

I frankly have no idea if Estilo came back for a second part of their set - we were so full of food that we didn't move for some time, sitting around the dining table to talk and have coffee. This ritual, known as sobremesa, is almost as important as the food itself here and deserving of its own entry some day. Casiñeira may be home to only around 70 souls, but the warmth of their welcome and hospitality would stand for ten times that number.