President or Prime Minister of Spain?
Jan 31, 2008 in Element
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In my Weekly Standard piece on the Madrid bombing verdicts, I referred to the Spanish Prime Minister. A friend quite properly queried me about it, pointing out that in Spain, and in the Spanish newspapers, the head of government is referred to as the President. I, of course, had a moment of fact-checking panic. Especially if you lived in Spain through an election, as I did in 2004. However, it turns out that either term is okay in English. I quote from Wikipedia below, but I had it double checked by a Spanish lawyer at my law school for accuracy.
Also, I should have been clearer that Aznar was not standing for reelection; the new head of his party was; I was trying to save space and ran over that a bit. Finally, editing error on my part - the second bomb attempt on the Seville-Madrid rail line was several ‘days’, not several ‘weeks’, after the March 11 attacks. (My thanks to my editor at La Revista de Libros, for drawing that to my attention. I knew I should have asked him to look at this before it ran!)
From Wikipedia:
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Official title
The Spanish head of government is known, in Spanish, as the Presidente del Gobierno. Literally translated, this title is “President of the Government” or alternatively “Chairman of the Government”, but nevertheless the office-holder is commonly referred to in English as the “prime minister“: the usual term for the head of government in a constitutional monarchy. However the Spanish for ‘prime minister’ is primer ministro; thus, for example, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is the Primer Ministro del Reino Unido, not the Presidente del Gobierno.
In Spain the President of the Government is often called simply Presidente, meaning ‘President’. More than once this has caused embarrassing errors among foreign authorities, such as mistaking Spain for a republic. For example Jeb Bush, the Governor of Florida, mistakenly referred to the head of government as the “President of the Spanish Republic” during a visit to Spain in 2003.
The custom to name the head of government as “President” dates back from the reign of Isabella II of Spain, when the Prime Minister was called Presidente del Consejo de Ministros (”President of the Cabinet”). Before 1833 the figure was known as Secretario de Estado (”Secretary of State”), a denomination used today for junior ministers.
Election
The President of the Government is not directly elected by the people but indirectly elected by the legislature. Following legislative elections, which take place every four years, the leader of the majority party, or the leader of the majority coalition, is usually proposed as President of the Government by the King and elected by the Congress of Deputies. The First Vice President of the Government (or First Deputy Prime Minister) is appointed by the King on the proposal of the President. President or Prime Minister of Spain?
Could Mark Helprin be right about a rare alignment of interests among Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the US, and other Arab states? Here in the Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2007. Excerpt:
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The United States has fought the war in Iraq as if history, strategy, maneuver, preparation, foresight, and common sense did not exist. Nonetheless, the impact of the war has been to shatter the politics of the region and create new opportunities, one of which is the potential for a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Some quarters of government, burnt by the predictable failure of the current administration to transform the political culture of the Middle East into that of a Vermont town meeting, are pessimistic by analogy. But the analogy is invalid. The conditions are not the same, the task is different, and, unlike the United States, Israel has no timetable for withdrawal from the regionas its enemies well know.
As America blunts its sword in Iraq it has relieved Iran of much anxiety in regard to its own vulnerabilities, set up a predominantly Shiite state in Baghdad, and made the Arab world more receptive to Iranian views. The Shia ascendancy comprises a resurgent though weak Iran, a Shiite Iraqi state in critical condition, a Shiite rump in Lebanon chastened by the war it “won” a year ago (with such a victory, defeat is unnecessary), and the alignment with Iran of Syria and Sunni radicals such as Hamas.
Contrary to the received wisdom, last summer Hezbollah overplayed its hand. Israel emerged shaken but with few casualties and an economy that actually grew during hostilities. The vaunted Hezbollah Katyushas had a 1% kill rate, with not one launched in the year thereafter. Israel showed that upon provocation it could and would destroy anything in its path, thus creating a Lebanese awakening that has split the country and kept Hezbollah fully absorbed. Though Hezbollah is rearming, it remains shy of Israel.
Hamas, too, has overplayed its hand, providing the opening from which a Palestinian-Israeli peace may emerge. For the first time since 1948, a fundamental division among the Palestinians presents conditions in which the less absolutist view may shelter and take hold. Mahmoud Abbas is weak in many ways, but he has decisively isolated the radical tendencies. Hamas loyalists in the West Bank (according to the latest polling, less than 25%) face a different demographic in a different economy that can be richly watered if Israel is wise enough to do so. Surrounded and interpenetrated by the Israeli army and Palestinian Authority forces now strengthened by Israel and the West, Hamas is not what it once was.
In economically besieged Gaza, Hamas is corralled by Israel, Egypt, and the sea, its apparent strength exaggerated by the fact that Abbas did not choose to fight on this battlefield but rather to profit by its loss, much as did King Hussein in regard to the West Bank. The starving and oppressed Palestinians who watch Hamas fire rockets the chief effect of which is to summon Israeli tanks, may soon see a prosperous West Bank at the brink of statehood and at peace with its neighbors and the world. The quarantine of Gaza will cast a bright light upon the normalization of the West Bank. And although Hamas portrays Abbas as a collaborator, it is they who may be held to account for keeping more than a million of their own people hostage to a gratuitous preference for struggle over success.
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The sudden and intense commonality of interest between the Palestinian Authority and Israel is the equivalent of the Israeli-Egyptian “anvil” of 1977. But unlike 1977, the Arabs, in the second circle, have largely reversed position. Fearful of Iran, they are rushing to bend the rejectionists against the anvil. They have so much to contend with at home and in the east that they cannot afford an active front in their midst, and are therefore forming ranks against Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas.
We are at the potential beginnings of a rare alignment of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the leading Arab nations, and the major powers. Though it is true that one of Russia’s chief interests is to keep the Middle East roiled so as to preserve the high oil prices that are now Russia’s life blood, when the region moved from Soviet to Western arms Moscow was relegated to the periphery. Though Europe is militarily paralyzed it wields great economic incentives, and though the United States has not done very well of late, its powers remain preeminent and its will constructive.
The principals, the important Arab states, and the international community are arrayed against a radical terrorist front that, unlike in Iraq, is geographically fractured, relatively contained, terribly poor, and very much outnumbered. Anything for the worse can happen in the Arab-Israeli conflict and usually does, but now the chief pillars of rejectionist policy lie flat, and the spectrum of positions is such that each constructively engaged party can accommodate the others.
In the heat of a failing war, historical processes have unfrozen. If the principals pursue a strategy of limited aims, concentrating on bilateral agreements rather than a single work of fallible grandeur, they may accomplish something on the scale of Sadat’s extraordinary dmarche of 30 years ago. The odds are perhaps the best they have been since then, and responsible governments should recognize them as the spur for appropriate action and risk. An alignment of interests in the Middle East?
