Behind the Spanish left's worst electoral loss
By G. Buster
In the March 12 Spanish election, the left suffered the worst electoral defeat in its history. After four years of conservative and neo-liberal policies, the governing People's Party (PP) was able to obtain an absolute majority in parliament. Jose Maria Aznar, its leader, will be able to rule without the support of the conservative nationalist Catalan party, Convergence and Union (CiU).
These results and the failure of the "Left Pact" signed between the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and the United Left (IU) have opened profound crises in the social democratic PSOE and IU, which is dominated by the Spanish Communist Party (PCE).
What happened?
These election results were unexpected, not forecast by any polls. The PP obtained 44% (nearly 6% more than in 1996), the PSOE 34% (3.5% less) and IU 5.5% (down from 10.5%). The rest of the parties more or less maintained their previous percentages, with a small increase in the vote of the nationalist and regionalist parties, most of all the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG), but also the Andalucist Party (PA), the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and the Aragonist Union (CHA).
In Euskadi (the Basque Country), Herri Batasuna's decision to boycott the poll generally favoured the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which added two more seats to its five existing positions.
But the most important statistic of all is the 2,832,000 left voters of 1996 who decided this time to ignore the call by the PSOE and IU to vote for their Left Pact. Eighteen per cent of 1996 PSOE voters and 43% of 1996 IU voters preferred to picnic in the spring weather.
Participation fell from 77.3% to 69.9% of eligible voters, and these weren't right-wing supporters; the PP was able to convince only 500,000 former PSOE voters, 100,000 former IU voters and 32,000 former CiU voters of its fitness to govern (that is, more than 2 million former PSOE and IU voters saw no point in marking the ballot paper). Also, there was little transfer of votes between the two left parties (although around 200,000 votes bled to nationalist forces).
The conservatives have certainly profited from an economic bonanza, with small but regular decreases in the unemployment figures. They have maintained a constant dialogue with the two main trade unions, the General Union of Labour (UGT) and the Workers Commissions (CC. OO.), avoiding social conflicts with the hard core of the Spanish working class.
More importantly, the end of the cease-fire by Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA) has sparked a new wave of Spanish nationalism and made the PP its champion. Aznar called for a majority government that would "bring peace" to the Basque Country by police repression and end all deals with the Catalan conservatives, his former partners.
These factors weighed much more heavily than the main legacies of four years of PP rule: the blatant drive to create a "crony bourgeoisie" by privatising Spain's most profitable public companies, and a society in which 1 million people live in extreme poverty, 36% of workers are employed on a casual basis (the highest in Europe) and the unemployment rate is still around 15%. They even counted more than the fact that it is widely known that the PP deliberately sabotaged the peace process in the Euskadi and brutally represses any strike or factory occupation by militant trade unionists.
An important part of the explanation is that the PSOE did the same, if not worse, in their 13 years of government, and people remembered. To stand any chance of winning again after its 1996 defeat, the party had to convince the electorate that it really had changed. And so it promised to "open up" and "clean out the house".
For the first time, primaries were held to elect a new leader to replace Felipe Gonzalez, the previous prime minister. Josep Borrell, the underdog candidate, won with the votes of the timid left of the party.
A year later, the combined action of the PSOE bureaucracy and its allies in the media had undermined Borrell's leadership so badly that he was forced to resign after a small scandal involving one of his former subordinates at the Ministry of Industry. The party bureaucracy's candidate in the primaries, Joaquin Almunia, become the new leader of the "renewed" PSOE after a vote of the executive committee in a closed meeting.
United Left decline
Since 1996, when it obtained 10.5% of the vote, the United Left hasn't been able to either become a credible parliamentary alternative to the PSOE or organise a serious extra-parliamentary opposition to the PP government. Its main focus has been on parliament, not on the social movements. Carried away by the need to maintain its independent identity to the left of the PSOE, it has sometimes been more critical of the PSOE than of the PP itself.
It also suffered a split to its right (which went into the PSOE) and was unable to sustain a democratic internal regime on federal lines, a must in a pluri-national state like Spain. This led to further splits in Galicia and Catalonia.
Despite all these shortcomings, IU was still the last ditch of resistance: the only Spanish political force to oppose neo-liberalism and NATO, and defend, at least in principle, the right of national self-determination. However, all these essential points were junked in the Left Pact signed with the PSOE less than two months before the election.
Almunia offered the pact. His motives were clear: only by adding the 1996 votes of IU to those of the PSOE would he stand a serious chance of winning. But this on the condition that he gained from his left without losing to his right. In other words, on the basis of the PSOE's own program.
After some doubts, and without consulting the rank and file members, the IU leaders accepted the deal as the only possible antidote to their own impending "downsizing" at the poll. This was a pact of the left party bureaucracies, and it was welcome by the trade union bureaucracies.
Alternative Space (EA), the main left tendency in IU, voted against the pact and defended a tactic of supporting the PSOE in case it obtained enough votes and needed those of IU to form government — but on the basis of maintaining political independence. EA also pointed out that even the government pact of France's socialist and communist parties was more progressive than that imposed by the PSOE
Little wonder, then, that the campaign of the PSOE and IU was unable to attract or mobilise its traditional voters. Almunia spent a lot of time explaining to everybody that the Left Pact didn't mean a turn to the left. Francisco Frutos, the general secretary of the PCE and the new leader of IU, kept recalling the struggle of the working class against Franco, apparently the best tactic for defending those whose struggles against capitalism are always branded by the PP government as "unmodern".
Not a word of solidarity was given to the secondary students who, organised by the alternative youth groups, struck against the conservative curricula imposed by the PP government. Not a mention of the strike of the railway workers, whose radical trade union was dissolved by the bureaucratic leadership of CC. OO. to force them to accept an agreement signed by the UGT. Not a penny was collected for the dismissed workers of Naval, in Gijon, who defended their factory and jobs for days against police assault.
What now?
The PSOE and IU crises will be deep. Almunia has already fallen on his sword and the PSOE will soon hold a congress to "renew" itself for the second time.
Within IU, the first debates at the federal council have been less than encouraging. Its Sixth Assembly will not be held before October, while there is a general mood of depression and many militants want to forget about electoral politics — or politics altogether — and focus on the social movements as a way of organising a comeback for the left, supposedly free of the constraints of the PSOE and IU.
But politics are badly needed. Without a clear program and an organised effort to coordinate the outbreaks of resistance, the new majority PP government will be able to defeat any struggle by applying the salami tactic (slicing off sections of opposition one at a time). And this holds not only for the social movements, but also for the nationalist left organisations. Too many of their militants seem to have concluded that the electoral defeat of the Spanish left only confirms its worthlessness as a potential ally and that it is enough to focus on building their own forces within the confines of Euskadi, Catalonia or Galicia.
This is a dangerous and mistaken trend. The all-Spanish left may need new imaginative forms of solidarity and coordination, but without an alliance with the nationalist left there can be no real alternative to the Spanish nationalism of the PP.
We have seen the worst of times. In the end, it may be that the working class is simply fed up with its bureaucracies and is searching for its own voice. So now is definitely not the time to abandon the struggle for a genuinely anti-capitalist left in the Spanish state.
[G. Buster is a member of Alternative Space.]