This is the Bailout Spain

I feel more and more distant from this outrageous irrational, arrogant and unfair Spain that clearly needs much more than a ruinous bank bailout... My disaffection is starting to exceed the rage awakened by all those high-speed trains that are leading nowhere, all the brand-new unnecessary airports or all those unfair tolls we pay –and I’m not just referring to motorway tolls. The whole thing is getting more and more personal.

I decided long ago to manage without having Spanish nationality. I believe that in order to be Catalan I don’t need a Spanish passport. My like-minded friends also consider their passports to be “foreign”. I am just Catalan (by adoption, that is) with a German look and passport –and that’s all. Or that’s what I thought till my “residence card” expired and I had to change it to the new NIE (certificate of identification number for foreigners), a document whose name reminds us of some regimes from the past and that must be obtained directly from the National Police –‘in person’ and exclusively at the police station in Girona, the main city in north-eastern Catalonia. I went there well prepared, with all the documents I had found out I needed on the Internet. I checked on-line because I could not check by phone, as none of the automatic recorded answers provided to users make any distinction between citizens of the EU and citizens from the rest of the world. This is the best testimony of the disdain with which the Spanish administration deals with all human beings.

After realizing that illegal immigrants are welcomed with all sorts of humanitarian aid and healthcare only in front of TV cameras, I reached the first floor, the one for EU foreign citizens, where I was “served” by a civil servant lady who has yet to learn that she gets paid to help the public. She forced me to speak only in Spanish as I was in “Spanish territory” as she put it. Since I only wanted to get the administrative procedures done (and did not want any ‘trouble’) I started giving her all my papers. But she would not pay any attention to them. She just addressed me in Spanish saying ‘Do you want me to tell you which are the papers you need? We have a new law, you know, and the information on the web page became outdated three weeks ago and that’s not my fault. Nor is my fault that the customer service phones do not work’, she retorted. She even left me unattended for a while only to chat with one of her colleagues across the hall, obviously without bothering to get up from her chair. In the 21st century such degrading treatment from a state employee is thoroughly unacceptable –and so is the time wasted travelling miles only because they just won’t update their website nor will they get organized to provide the service they are meant to provide or one should expect nowadays. From now on I will live in Catalonia as if I were a fugitive without identifying documents, and we’ll see what happens...

Thomas Spieker

(Thomas Spieker is a columnist of German origin who has been living in Catalonia for over 40 years)

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