The most likely government to emerge - most analysts predict - will be a coalition including a hard-right nationalist party for the first time in Spain since the death of fascist dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.
More left-leaning Spaniards are frantically texting contacts, urging them to make sure to vote - despite the heat and it being holiday time for many - to “stop the fascists” in their tracks.The rhetoric this election season has been toxic, with voters becoming increasingly polarised.
It’s a fight over values, traditions and about what being Spanish should mean in 2023.
This kind of heated identity debate isn’t peculiar to Spain. Think of Italy, France, Brazil or the post-Trumpian debate in the US.
At EU HQ in Brussels, there are huge concerns about a resurgence of hard-right nationalist parties across Europe.
Unfortunately, this is a huge reality happening in almost all EU countries, at least those that accepted a ton of immigrants. I live in Spain, and I can tell you that right and hard-right winning is a no surprise at all. There’s a minor but loud immigrant that simply doesn’t care about anything but themselves: for example, go search the thefts crimes committed in Barcelona these few years: they increased by an alarming rate. In fact, the 60% of prisoners in Spain are foreigners. The overall crime rates have increased since accepting so much immigration. And this is a shame, because obviously not all immigrants are the same, but for the fault of those minor cases, they reputation is decreasing hardly.
And, before anyone crosses me out as a “nazi” or anti-immigration let me tell you: when I was born, my parents didn’t have the Spanish citizenship, so yep, my family and I were illegal immigrants. Also, my parents suffered from discrimination (for example, their university degrees were never validated, people were extra mean to them, insults (“return to your home”, “we don’t speak that language here”… you name it) but even with this discrimination level, they never, but never steal from anyone, they never raped anyone, they worked very hard and finally, after 20 years, we can say that we’re living a normal live.
Tomorrow is the election, and obviously voting those parties in my perspective is stupid, but I can understand why is happening.
The titles not being validated is not discrimination, there is a process for that. There is an standarization with education in Europe and just accepting any title would be troubleshome.
While I understand this, they were college degrees after all. Maybe this were my parents fault for not invastigating better, but even then, this doesn’t underestimate all the other forms of discrimination they (and even I) were faced against.
In my previous work there was this client with an African wife, a doctor, she obviously had the title but she couldn’t work in Spain without validating her title but doing some exams in Spanish, they were working on that.
I will bring my girlfriend from her country here and I told her she will need to do that in order to validate her academic titles. It’s a shame that someone that was top of her class won’t be able to use those academic results here.
It has nothing to do with discrimination, it’s about maintaining educational standards.
Yeah, sorry for that. Unfortunately it’s true that most people will look you weird if you tell them you’re an illegal immigrant, mainly due to the not-so-great stereotype