Wayne Rooney Shirts and a Pint of Bitter - a Big Role for Little Britain in Spain's Elections

Like many other headmasters across Europe, Jesús Pastor has suddenly found his classrooms filling up with foreign children. They do not speak their teachers' language and their previous schooling in another country has left them with significant holes in their knowledge.

What makes Mr Pastor different, however, is that the children bringing a new language into the playground of his José María Manresa primary school in San Fulgencio, eastern Spain, are not dirt poor immigrants from the developing world but are, in their vast majority, white and British. "The teachers are adapting, but the building cannot," says Mr Pastor, pointing to the prefab classrooms on a playground where some pupils dress in England football shirts and at least one wears a Wayne Rooney Manchester United outfit.

In fact, says Mr Pastor, half of his 430 pupils are British. Immigrants from from all over the world but mostly from northern Europe have doubled the school's size over the past six years; San Fulgencio now claims to be the Spanish municipality with the lowest proportion of Spaniards.

Each year Mr Pastor receives two new prefab huts, two new teachers and up to 50 extra British pupils who lack the basic survival skills for a Spanish primary school - including not just the Spanish language but also memorized times tables. His school is one of the few places that brings together two distinct communities separated not just by language and culture but by the three miles of farmland that lie between the almost wholly Spanish town of San Fulgencio and the ever-expanding, and almost totally foreign, La Marina estate of residential holiday homes.

The divide has never been more important than it is this week when, for the first time, the political future of San Fulgencio lies in the hands of British voters. On Sunday, May 27, as EU citizens they can decide who, over the next four years, controls a powerful town hall that runs everything from rubbish collection and road repairs to its own ambulance and police force.

Involvement

British ex-pats, usually notorious for ignoring what goes on around them in Spain, are heavily involved in these elections. Almost one in three candidates for the 13 council seats have English surnames. "The last election was well fixed," claims Mick Blake, a retired civil servant who is standing for the AIM party - recently formed by a group of mainly British new residents. "There is corruption in England but here it is in your face. They don't seem to care."

"They take the lion's share of the money," complains Alan Waller outside a meeting for the Orden y Progreso party, which wants La Marina and the other mainly foreign housing estates, or urbanizaciones, to be turned into a separate municipality away from the Spaniards of San Fulgencio. "They call us outsiders. That is their mentality."

Candidates are careful to woo votes not just in Spanish but in English and German as well. "The right choice. La mejor opción. Die beste Möglichkeit," says one campaign poster. "Tu alcalde. Your mayor. Dein Bürgermeister," proclaims the mayor, Mariano Martí , on his billboards.

Some campaigning reflects the cultural chasm between the townsfolk of San Fulgencio and the urbanización residents - which, mainly, means between Spaniards and Britons. A them-and-us mentality, which Mr Martí claims is being falsely whipped up, threatens to cleave the municipality. "We have evolved mentally. We don't see foreigners, as we once did, as something strange," he says. "Most of them are well integrated. There are people who want to divide us, but we should be united."

The new confidence of the British expats reflects their weight in the local community. Until recently San Fulgencio, set a few miles inland from the coast of Alicante province, was a small farming town of fruit and vegetable smallholders.

Over the past 15 years, however, it has signed up to the orgy of building that has consumed the Spanish coastline and anything near it. A tidal wave of bricks-and-mortar has swept over orange groves and open fields, replacing them with a patchwork of tightly-packed bungalows and rows of identical, small villas. English-speaking shops, bakeries and bars with names like The George, Poppies, Cornish Pride and Jack's reflect the preferences of those who live here. Tetley's and John Smith's cater to their drinking habits.

The municipality has 8,157 registered foreign residents, four times the number of Spaniards. Many ex-pats, convinced the Spanish tax man will come after them, do not register and their real numbers are estimated to be up to three times higher. Fewer still sign on to the electoral roll, but foreign voters are still a significant majority in San Fulgencio - as they are in a dozen other towns in Alicante province.

Struggle

As the battle for political control of both communities heats up, things have started to get nasty. Smear campaigns, vandalism, corruption complaints, court cases and far-right populism have all raised their ugly heads.

Opponents of one political party whisper accusations, without supporting evidence, that it superglued the locks to the surgery, the social centre and the residents' association in La Marina in an attempt to provoke discontent among the British.

Mr Martí, who heads his own small political party, denies accusations that San Fulgencio has milked the foreigners for all they are worth while refusing to spend money on their urbanizaciones.

He points to a new doctor in La Marina, free Spanish classes for adults, a special ambulance service and a second municipal police station.

"We have some things that they don't have here in the town," he says. "But they also have things that we don't have. Naturally, when we have to build a new school, we will build it up there."

The starkest divisions between the societies are often cultural. British residents ask why police officers carry guns but have to call a different force to make certain arrests. Why, they demand to know, do the police spend so much time drinking coffee? Why does the town hall spend €180,000 (£123,000) on fiestas? When will all the building stop?

Spaniards have their own questions. Why do some British parents expect the schoolteachers to speak English? Why do so many not bother to learn Spanish? And why, ask the townsfolk, do people want the building stopped when it has brought money and jobs?

"These are new times. There is no water left for agriculture. Residential tourism is a lifesaver for small towns like San Fulgencio," explains Mr Martí.

La Marina is not glitzy Marbella. Mr Pastor says the new pupils turning up at his school are the children of plumbers, electricians and hairdressers. They are often amazed that the school provides free meals and transport.

"We get a lot of children from broken families," explains Mr Pastor. "Often the parents don't speak any Spanish at all."

The residents have brought the best and the worst of Britain with them. There are theater clubs and charity fundraisers - and episodes of gang thuggery in the local secondary school.

British community volunteers say local Spanish politicians really have been learning. "I hope Mariano gets reelected," says Roland Hillman, who helps run a residents' association in La Marina. "He's given us a lot of the things we asked for."

Tomás Mazón, a sociologist at Alicante University, says foreign voters are often timid and may abstain. "Some genuinely feel they shouldn't vote at all," he said. "They certainly don't want a British mayor, because they think that would turn Spaniards against them."

But will British voters actually turn out? Denis Conway, a 74-year-old, remembers the last elections when the British community was a lot smaller. "The queue was so long that many people went home, saying they would be back later," he said. "Then they started watching Coronation Street and stayed at home."

New world

Officially there were 274,000 British residents in Spain last year. Only Moroccans, Ecuadorians and Romanians outnumber them as foreigners. The British, however, are packed into towns on the eastern and southern seaboard, with the highest density along or near the coast of Alicante province. A first wave of pensioners looking for good weather and cheap prices has been followed by a second of younger people providing services from pool cleaners to plumbers. From Rojales and Torrevieja in the south to Teulada and Javea in the north, the British presence is large and growing as Spaniards are now a minority in 15 towns in the province. The region of Murcia, where land is being built on for holiday developments, looks set to catch up with Alicante and the more mixed and established communities of northern Europeans on the Costa del Sol.