[Discussion] European Politics Discussion

Problem is that there's no clear majority. Spain will probably go again through a mess of governments failing, reelections, rinse and repeat.

It has the ingredients of a Frederick Forsyth thriller: stolen gold bullion, political intrigue, betrayal and a sprinkling of Adolf Hitler.

The saga of Ireland’s far-right National party and its vault of gold bars, however, has played out more like an Armando Iannucci farce.

On 23 July tweets on behalf of Justin Barrett, the leader of the tiny anti-immigrant party, said a “considerable” amount of gold had been removed from the party’s vault in south Dublin and that Barrett had asked police to intervene. The tweets called the alleged theft despicable and traitorous. “We will emerge from this fire and trial. Heat makes iron into steel.”

Gardaí promptly retrieved the gold, estimated to be worth €400,000 (£344,000), but two weeks later it remains unclear if the gold really was stolen, who owns it, what it was doing in the vault – and whether Barrett remains the party’s leader.

“An Garda Síochána is carrying out inquiries into an allegation of theft from a premises in Dublin 4,” a police statement said on Wednesday. “These inquiries are ongoing and no further information is available at this time.”

Media reports say police believe the party owns just a small fraction of the gold, with senior party members owning the rest. Barrett said it was stockpiled in case of a collapse in currency values.

Emma Blain, a councillor with the ruling Fine Gael party, has asked the Standards in Public Office regulator to investigate reports that the National party has not filed accounts for several years nor explained funding sources. The party did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.

One summer ago, before the region’s fish and chip industry was shaken by closures, before a death that was hard for people to bear, a lorry heaped with the first fresh potatoes of the season drove along the east coast of Scotland. This lorry wound its way along the East Neuk of Fife, dodging washing lines, mooring bollards and seagulls, parking with impunity to make deliveries. There was an understanding in the East Neuk that nobody would ever get angry and honk at the inbound “tattie” lorry, fish and chips being a staple meal, vital to the region’s economy. Tourists come shocking distances to sit on old harbour walls and stab around in takeaway trays with wooden forks. The fish and chips sold in the East Neuk might be the best in the British Isles and because of that (it follows) the best on the planet. Even so, by July 2022, local friers were finding it harder and harder to balance their books.

The driver of the tattie lorry, a red-cheeked Scotsman named Richard Murray, carried keys for most of the businesses on his route, to save from waking any tired friers who’d been up late the night before, poring anxiously over their sums. War in Ukraine coupled with ongoing complications from Brexit had driven up prices of almost all the goods that fish and chip shops depended on, from live ingredients to oil and salt to packaging. More distressing was the problem of rising energy costs. This meal is prepared using a great guzzler of a range cooker that must be kept on and roiling at all hours of a trading day. As the price of gas and electricity threatened to double, then triple, through 2022, friers were opening their energy bills with gritted teeth. A trade association called the National Federation of Fish Friers said that as many as a third of the UK’s 10,500 shops might go dark, warning of a potential “extinction event”.

It was on a sun-kissed stretch of beach in Catalonia that Segimon Rovira began to feel self-conscious. For as long as the 56-year-old could remember, the area’s turquoise waters had primarily been frequented by nudists. Now, he was painfully aware of being surrounded by sunbathers – in their swimsuits.

“Before, people would arrive at a nude beach and either leave or strip down,” said Rovira. “Now they stay and keep their swimsuit on. But what they don’t realise is that if there are a lot of them, they end up making us uncomfortable. It’s a lack of respect.”

Now Rovira and other naturists in Catalonia are fighting back, with a campaign aimed at protecting the decades-long tradition associated with 50 or so of the region’s beaches.

“Nudism is not banned in Spain, you can do it on any beach,” said Rovira, who leads the Naturist-Nudist Federation of Catalonia. “But so as not to bother people, we prefer to go to beaches that have traditionally been nudist and where most people are naked. We want people to respect this.”

Recently the association sent a letter to the Catalan government asking for a meeting to address what it described as “the discrimination that nudists face on the beaches of Catalonia”. The collective has already starting mulling potential requests, from beefed-up signage for nude beaches to a public awareness campaign that could help foster respect for naturism. They have yet to receive a response.

At the heart of what the local media call the “textile invasion” is the boom in tourism and explosion of social media. As an ever-growing trove of blogs and travel guides vie to lead sun-seekers off the beaten path, they’ve highlighted the region’s most pristine and hidden beaches, often leaving out their longstanding ties to nudism.

Other times beachgoers themselves have chosen to overlook these ties, traipsing past the signs that read “nudist beach” in order to secure a spot on the golden sands. “We’ve lost a bit of civility,” said Rovira.

The result threatens to steadily erode naturism. “There are nudists who have stopped going to some beaches because they are too crowded and there are too many people wearing swimsuits and they feel uncomfortable,” he said.

Others have chosen to remain clothed, dissuaded by the throngs of smartphone-wielding visitors eager to share the beautiful backdrop with their online followers, said Rovira. “People that are naked don’t want to end up with their photos on social media.”

Some nudists have persevered, only to find themselves the focus of giggles, prolonged stares and, at times, disparaging remarks. “Unfortunately the women are usually more stared at or harassed,” said Rovira. “So they are discriminated against twice over; for being nudists and for being women.”

The hope is that the campaign will help ensure that certain beaches remain safe spaces for naturists and help to keep the tradition going. “Starting to practise naturism when you’re surrounded by people in clothing is very complicated,” said Rovira. “That’s why we think it’s important to have nudist spaces where the majority of people are nude so that people are encouraged to try it.”

The "not wanting naked pictures posted on the internet" seems like a very real concern to me.

Germany’s ruling Social Democratic party is set to propose a three-year rent break across the country, as tenants struggle to cope with the soaring cost of housing in Europe’s largest economy.

“We need to create breathing room — we need a rent freeze for the next three years,” senior SPD lawmaker Verena Hubertz told Bild am Sonntag, adding that Chancellor Olaf Scholz would outline measures on Monday to tackle the country’s cost of living crisis.

The SPD forms the most powerful group in Germany’s three-party coalition government.

Rents have this year risen at record rates across Germany — a country where the cost of housing has traditionally been stable enough for families to live in rented accommodation throughout their lives. Among Germany’s 41mn households, slightly less than 60 per cent live in rented accommodation, according to the German Federal Statistical Office.

Germans are also facing higher prices for other goods. Overall consumer price inflation was 6.2 per cent in the year to July, against a eurozone average of 5.3 per cent.

Existing rules aimed at regulating the property market cap rent increases at 20 per cent over three years — or 15 per cent in areas that have been designated as having particularly tight housing markets. Germany’s coalition government has already agreed to lower this cap to 11 per cent — something that the SPD has now signalled is not enough.

The party’s plans, according to a proposal seen by the news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur, is to allow rents to rise by a maximum of 6 per cent in cities where demand is very high, while a blanket freeze would apply across the rest of the country.