By Conn Hallinan
In what seems a replay of recent
German and Italian elections, an openly authoritarian and racist party made
major electoral gains in Spain’s most populous province, Andalusia, helping to
dethrone the Socialist Party that had dominated the southern region for 36
years. Vox (Voice)—a party that stands for “Spain First,” restrictions on
women’s rights, ending abortion, stopping immigration, and dismantling the
country’s regional governments—won almost 11 percent of the vote.
The party is in negotiations to be
part of a ruling right-wing coalition, while left parties are calling for an
“anti-fascist front.” It’s as if the old Spanish dictator Francisco Franco had
arisen from his tomb in the “Valley of the Fallen” and was again marching on
Madrid.
Actually, the results were not so
much “stunning”—the British Independent’s headline on the election—as a case of
chickens coming home to roost, and a sobering lesson for center-left and left
forces in Europe.
The December 2 vote saw the
center-left Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) lose 14 seats in the
regional parliament and the leftist alliance, Adelante Andalucía, drop three.
The conservative Popular Party (PP) also lost seven seats, but, allied with Vox
and the right-wing Ciudadanos (Citizens) Party, the right now has enough seats
to take power. It was the worst showing in PSOE’s history, and, while it is
still the largest party in Andalucía, it will have to go into opposition.
On one level, the Andalucian
elections do look like Germany, where the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany
(AfG) took 94 seats in the Bundestag, and Italy, where the right-wing,
xenophobic Northern League is sharing power with the center-right Five Star
Movement.
There are certainly parallels to
both countries, but there are also major differences that are uniquely Spanish.
What is similar is the anger at the
conventional center-right and center-left parties that have enforced a decade
of misery on their populations. Center-left parties like the Democratic Party
in Italy and the Social Democratic Party in Germany bought into the failed
strategy of neoliberalism that called for austerity, regressive taxes,
privatization of public resources, and painful cutbacks in social services as a
strategy for getting out of debt.
Not only was it hard for most people
to see a difference between the center-left and the center-right, many times
the parties governed jointly, as they did in Germany. Andalucía’s Socialists
were in an alliance with Ciudadanos.
However, the rise of parties like
Vox and the AfG has less to do with a surge from the right than as a collapse
of the center-right and center-left. The Spanish Socialists did badly, but so
did the right-wing Popular Party. In Germany, both the center-right and the
center-left took a beating.
The leftist AA took a hit as well,
but that was in part due to some infighting in Podemos, and the party did not
mobilize significant forces on the ground. And because Podemos kept its
distance from the crisis in Catalonia, it ceded the issue of separatism to the
right, particularly Ciudadanos, which wrapped itself in the Spanish flag.
Podemos actually has a principled
position on Catalan independence: It opposes it but thinks the matter should be
up to the Catalans. It also supports greater cultural and economic autonomy for
Spain’s richest province. But when Rajoy unleashed the police on the October
2017 independence referendum, beating voters and arresting Catalan leaders,
Podemos merely condemned the violence. The Socialists supported Rajoy, although
they too expressed discomfort with the actions of the police.
Ciudadanos, on the other hand,
enthusiastically supported the violent response, even provoking it. According
to Thomas Harrington, a professor of Iberian Studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Conn. and an expert on Catalonia, Ciudadano members’ systematically
removed yellow ribbons that Catalans had put up to protest the imprisonment of
Catalan leaders. Harrington quotes Eduardo Llorens, a prominent member of the
Ciudadano-supported unionist movement: “Violent reactions by the
independentists must be forced. We’ve done a good job of constructing the
narrative of social division, but violent acts on their part are still needed
to consolidate it. In the end, they will react. It’s just a matter of our being
persistent.”
The PSOE had a generally progressive
economic program, but it appears many Spaniards don’t believe them. The leftist
AA had a much better program, but was hobbled by internal problems and
downplayed the Catalan issue. That left a clear field for Ciudadanos, which
hammered away at the Catalan separatists. Ciudadanos ended up getting 18.3
percent of the vote, more than double what it got in the last election. The
PSOE and PP are still the two largest parties in the province.
As
for Vox, it is surely disturbing that such an antediluvian party could get 10.5
percent of the vote, but it would be a mistake to think that Franco is back. In
fact, he never went away. When the dictator died in 1975, the Spaniards buried
the horrors of the 1936-39 civil war and the ensuing repression, rather than
trying to come to terms with them: some 200,000 political dissidents executed,
500,000 exiled, and 400,000 sent to concentration camps.
Vox tapped into that section of the
population that opposes the “Historical Memory Law” condemning the Franco
regime and still gathers at Valley of the Fallen or in town squares to chant
fascist slogans and give the stiff-arm salute. But the party is small, around
7,000, and part of the reason it did well was because of extensive media
coverage. Most the party’s votes came from PP strongholds in wealthy
neighborhoods.
Following the election, thousands of
people poured into the streets of Seville, Granada, and Malaga to chant
“fascists out.”
Certainly, the European right is
scary, particularly in Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece, Austria, and France. It
has absconded with some of the left’s programs, like ending austerity, a
guaranteed wage, and resisting the coercive power of the European Union. Once
elected, of course, it will jettison those issues, just as the Nazis and
fascists did in pre-war Germany and Italy. And removing them will not be easy
since their only commitment to democracy is as a tool to chisel their way into
power.
The center-left and the left are
still formidable forces in Europe, and their programs do address the crisis of
unemployment, growing economic disparity, and weakening social safety nets. But
the path to success will require re-thinking the strategy of the past 30 years
and fighting for programs like those the British Labour Party adopted under
Jeremy Corbyn: rolling back the privatization of public resources; a graduated
tax scale based on wealth; investments in education, health, housing, and
infrastructure; raising the minimum wage; encouraging unions; and seriously tackling
the existential issue of climate change. (IPA Service)
The writer is a former editor of People’s
World
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