Inside Spain: Algae football kits and why the police are far-right
Inside Spain For Members
In this week's Inside Spain, we look at why Vox would be in power if only the Spanish police and military could vote, and how a Spanish football team is raising awareness about an invasive algae polluting Andalusia's sea with an innovative kit.
According to Spain's Research Council (CIS), almost half of Spain's police and military forces vote for far-right groups.
Their data shows that 33 percent of them support Vox, while 14 percent vote for the fringe radical party of Alvise Pérez, 'The Party is Over' (Se Acabó La Fiesta).
In fact, more police officers and soldiers vote for Santiago Abascal's Vox party than for the long-established centre-right Popular Party (30 percent).
So if only the Spanish military and police voted in the country's general election there would most likely be a far-right government in power, especially if they aligned with the PP, as they'd have 77 percent of the total votes.
So would the remaining 13 percent of the vote share go to Sánchez's Socialists? No, as 7 percent of Spanish police and military officers opt for the blank or null vote option, and only 6 percent vote for the PSOE.
And how about the hard-left junior coalition party Sumar? They only get a measly 1 percent of votes from policías and militares.
"In political sociology we are not used to seeing gaps of this size," Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, professor of Political Science at the University of Southampton, told news site Info Libre about his findings showing that Spanish soldiers were five times more likely to vote for Vox than civilians.
So why are the police and armed forces in a country which is generally quite left-leaning so overly right-wing?
Their patriotic beliefs have certainly played a role, with Vox's criticism of the Catalan independence push and Sánchez's amnesty for its main perpetrators striking a chord with the police and armed forces.
Even though Spain's national police head Francisco Pardo called Vox's claim that immigration caused crime 'a huge lie', it seems clear that those on the ground don't think the same.
For Turnbull-Dugarte, the comradery that occurs in the Spanish army barracks and police academis pushes soldiers and police officers to the right.
The traditional military culture, work duties linked to authoritarianism, the emphasis on masculinity, the patriotic vision of the State, the rejection of minorities considered unpatriotic, the sacredness of national unity - all these views align far more with Vox's rhetoric than with the progressive talk of Spain's PM.
Let's just hope Santiago Abascal doesn't choose to stage a coup d'état, because it seems likely he'd have thousands of police officers and soldiers on his side.
The jersey is made with recycled plastic from the ocean as well as a textile fabric created from the brown algae.
Named Rugulopteryx okamurae, the algae has spread rapidly in the Mediterranean impacting biodiversity, fishing and tourism, as well as proving expensive to remove.
Betis, who presented the shirt in the town of Tarifa on Thursday, a town particularly affected by the issue, will wear it on February 16th against Real Sociedad in La Liga.
"The presence of invasive algae on our coasts is destroying our ecosystem," wrote Betis in a post on social media.
"To confront them, the first kit made with fibres created from these algae was born."
Marine biologist Candela Sánchez Atienzar told news agency AFP the algae, native to the North Pacific, most likely arrived in Spanish waters in 2015 "through the ballast waters of merchant ships".
"When it arrived it started to spread out of control, there's no invasion in the history of science described on this scale," she said.
Rafael Muela Pastor, the director of Betis' social foundation, said it was a good opportunity to raise awareness of the problem.
"News was reaching us that the invasive Asian algae was causing many problems in all sectors in the area," he said.
"We wanted to take advantage of this situation in some way to draw attention to the importance of caring for our oceans and seas."
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