How I became a Spanish patriot

My personality is a mixture of shy and extrovert.  I like listening more than talking. I enjoy hearing eloquence in political speeches, council meetings, lectures and sermons. I also love eavesdropping in more than one language. I enjoy the casual talk I overhear in bars. It is rarely eloquent, but it can be pithy or humorous.

I passed most of my life without feeling any sentiments of patriotism until last month. I couldn’t really understand the concept of being proud of a country because you were born there. It’s a bit like automatically loving parents even if their behaviour is toxic. It also has a similarity to playing for a team and I have never been a team player.

My husband has frequently played for teams both in chess and back in his schooldays for rugby and swimming. He also wallows in patriotism from time to time. He once said if Putin invaded, he would be off to Cornwall defending with a pitchfork. He has never visited Cornwall, has no family connections there and doesn’t own a pitchfork. Indeed, he is so lacking in gardening skills he has never even grown mustard and cress. He is from an Air Force family that was moved around. Patriotism was part of the package. He was born in Cyprus before moving to Singapore, but he was always in England in his head. He still is.

After Brexit damaged my rights, those of voting and freedom of movement, I decided to change my nationality to Spanish. It was a long, intricate process because of the bureaucracy involved and took about 3 years. I wished my former country well but had no plans to go there with a pitchfork if anyone invaded. I had to study the Spanish Constitution a bit before taking the exams for nationality. I realised then that I would be acquiring more human rights than I had when I was British and that was a plus. I don’t look typically Spanish, and I speak the language with a slight Russian accent thanks to studying karate in Spanish with Russians and Lithuanians in Torrevieja. In some sense I will always be an outsider. Our son is also involved in the process of changing his nationality. Brexit caused him an infinite amount of damage. He was afraid to go to university in case a grant collapsed halfway through. Other plans he had to accompany friends to France to perfect a third language also fell through. When his girlfriend went to work in Iceland, which is in the single market with the EU, he found he could not legally work there as he was not an EU citizen and had to return to Spain within three months. Quite a few young Spanish are working in Iceland currently because of the very high rates of pay. It was another opportunity he could not share with friends. Their ability to work and move to other countries was much more flexible than his.

My first ever surge of patriotism came with the recent rise of Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. (His official title is “President of the Government” and so he is known as the President.) I already liked him because of the compassion in his eyes when he talked about immigrants, something very different from that of many other politicians around the world. Pedro Sánchez has had years of the Right knocking him and had to hold his government together almost with sticky tape. Somehow during this period, he acquired great skills of diplomacy, working to get patchwork amalgams of parties together. Spain requires an overall majority in its councils and government, so pacts and coalitions are the order of the day. A lot of those on the Right absolutely loathe him. An old guy in a local bar loves to shout what he would like to do to Pedro Sánchez with his stick. Think Edward II.

Until recently patriotism in Spain seemed to be the preserve of the Right. Quietly, Spanish socialism, PSOE, has been reclaiming it. Our local councillor of this party is from a family that owns a very good fish restaurant, La Marisquería. I sometimes breakfast there. His father was a councillor before him. It is one of the few bars left that still takes newspapers and I like the luxury of reading an actual newspaper instead of the briefer online versions. This family puts on many local events, and a recent one saw the installing of a Spanish flag in the children’s playground opposite. The flag was raised with music from a naval band. There were a few local mutterings by right-wing voters who were rather jealous that they hadn’t thought of doing this first.

The comic actor and director, Santiago Segura, has just brought out a satirical film called Torrente Presidente. He created the character Torrente years ago. In the first film he is a corrupt policeman. Torrente talks like the worst kind of bloke in a bar. He is full of all the usual prejudices. In the latest film a couple of slick guys from a far-right party realise his kind of talk appeals to the populist vote and that he might be useful to them. In the film the party is called Nox but is an obvious spoof on Spain’s real-life Vox party. The film is a satire on Spanish politics, with many recognisable characters, and on populism in general. The cinema was full in a way I had not seen for years, now that many people prefer to stream films at home. I have now watched the film twice. Each time the cinema was filled with laughter. It was a useful tonic during a period when Trump’s misdemeanours are filling most of the civilised world with fear. Trump features briefly in the film, played by Alec Baldwin. I presume this part was filmed several months ago as Baldwin’s Trump was considerably less of a caricature than any clip of Trump being Trump at present. Trump outside this film is less pitiable than Lear. He is King Lear holding the nuclear codes, a Portrait of Dorian Gray gone walkabout, visibly deliquescing and disintegrating, mentally and physically.

Until recently, hardly any leaders had the balls to stand up to Trump. They at most looked a little nervous when he perpetrated yet another gaffe. Probably many would have followed him blindly into a futile and illegal war in Iran. Then the Spanish President said no to the use of Spanish bases by the Americans and that was a game changer.

Pedro Sánchez is the absolute opposite of Trump: handsome, well-dressed and speaks five languages. He recently legalised about half a million immigrants. He is one of very few leaders to see the positive side of immigration. He has also stood up for Gitano (Gypsy) rights in Spain. They have been on the receiving end of much prejudice. I had only heard him speak in Spanish, but there is now a podcast an hour or so long in English where he is interviewed by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart and his English is close to perfect. He has also shown himself to be the master of brief memorable replies such as his “Mars can wait” to Elon Musk.

In spite of threats to trade he stood firm in refusing to help Trump. Slowly other leaders started to come round to his point of view. Trump had told him he was on his own; he replied that he was not alone but first. His learning curve of getting unlikely parties to agree was now something he could apply to working with other countries. Suddenly this projected him onto the world stage. The general feeling in Spain is that they had been tricked by lies into a previous war with the US and it wasn’t going to happen again.

Somehow, this moral stand flicked the patriotism switch in my head. The one I had not thought existed. I am now proud to be Spanish through my acquired nationality and proud of our President.

Santiago Segura’s film parodies most of the main characters in Spanish politics, including Sánchez. There is a kind of all round fairness in tackling both the Right and the Left. Some real TV celebs and a former President are there playing themselves to give the story verisimilitude. A lot of the humour is slapstick. There are many jokes in Spain about politicians being hijos de puta (whoresons).  Torrente is literally one. But there are more profound truths and philosophies as well. It’s the perfect film to help understand the shitshow that American politics has become. At the end, Kevin Spacey appears as the head of the Bilderberg Club and the Illuminati. We are left with the impression that whoever the people vote for, someone somewhere else might be pulling the strings.

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