The November 20 Spanish election went as the polls had forecast: the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) government was massacred, with its lowest vote in 34 years. The right-wing Popular Party got a 186-seat absolute majority in the 350-seat parliament and left and left-nationalist forces emerged stronger, led by the United Left (IU) and Amaiur, the Basque left-nationalist coalition.
Nothing worked for the PSOE’s lead candidate, former interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba. His campaign faced a nightmare situation with polls showing only 40% of people who voted PSOE in 2008 committed to sticking with it.
Failed left pitch
Rubalcaba’s reaction was a frenzied three months of scare-mongering, promises to make the rich pay a bit more and sly winks at the 15-M “Indignant” mass movement against corporate power (his campaign slogan was “Fight For What You Want”).
This combined with behavior suggesting that Rubalcaba had only a distant relationship with the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (near-invisible in the campaign).
Yet that message clashed directly with another tactic ― crude boosting of Rubalcaba as the minister who had forced Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom, ETA) to lay down its arms.
At three rallies every day, and with former prime minister Felipe Gonzalez doing an embarrassing Bob Hawke-style warm-up act, the PSOE candidate hammered away about the PP’s “secret program” of cuts to the welfare state and attacks on workers' rights.
The manufactured “indignation” simply invited from PP leader Mariano Rajoy this predictable response: his PP government would implement needed “reform” much more effectively than the PSOE bunglers. It would consult all “social partners” but make up its own mind on how best to pull Spain out of the quagmire created by the PSOE.
Rajoy’s one-point election program was that the conservatives would restore the vital missing ingredient of “confidence”.
“Confidence” would revive small and medium business’s desire to invest, and cut the five million-long queue of unemployed.
“Confidence” would placate the finance markets and see Spain restored as an equal in Europe. “Confidence” would make the sun come out and stir into action all that is good in the Spanish character…
Catalonia
PSOE theatrics about cuts to public services reached hysteria pitch in Catalonia, with a TV ad (later pulled) showing a dead patient surrounded by surgeons waiting in vain for their operating theatre funding to arrive.
Yet Catalonia, where the regional Convergence and Union (CIU) government has been leading the all-Spanish race to cut budget deficits, was the PSOE’s Waterloo. The fall in the vote of the Party of Catalan Socialists (PSC), the PSOE affiliate, was 18.2%. The CIU picked up 11.3% and the PP 4.6%.
Particularly telling was the rise in the PP and CIU vote in working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Barcelona and in the regional capitals, Girona, Tarragona and Lleida.
In Cornella de Llobregat, once a heartland of strikes and protests against the Franco dictatorship, the right-wing vote rose 10.7%, as against 5.6% for the left alliance Initiative for Catalonia and United and Alternative Left (ICV-EUIA).
The PSC scare campaign flopped because the party, in government up until a year ago, hadn’t a remotely credible alternative. By contrast, the CIU message was simple and blunt: “We’re having to implement austerity to sort out the shambles you people created and because your PSOE mates in Madrid refuse to give Catalonia the funding it deserves.”
Wrapping the red and yellow striped flag of Catalan nationalism around every austerity package and posing as the latest in Catalonia’s long line of martyrs to “Madrid” worked a treat.
Left vote
Apart from big losses in Ceuta and Melilla, the two Spanish enclaves in Morocco, the PSOE suffered its next-worst reversal (17%) in the Basque Country (Euskadi).
This reflected the support for the left-nationalist Amaiur and the sharp rise in voter participation after the movement was effectively banned from standing in the 2008 poll.
The effect of the Amaiur vote was to slash the PSOE presence in Euskadi and Navarra, the historical Spanish Basque lands, by 11 seats to five.
Amaiur’s other seat came from the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV). Although the PNV is still the most-voted for party in Euskadi, this result raises the possibility of Amaiur winning the 2013 elections for the Basque regional government.
Amaiur’s triumph, although not unexpected, sent shock-waves through Spanish politics. Rajoy has already decided he will exclude it from the traditional round of meetings with newly elected parliamentary groups.
Amaiur has called on the PNV and the moderate Navarra-nationalist Geroa Bai to join it in a single Basque parliamentary group in Madrid. The proposal puts great pressure on the PNV, which could pose as the reasonable face of Basque nationalism as long as ETA was setting off bombs.
The vote for other left-nationalists forces, such as the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG), stagnated, not the least because they have been junior partners in regional governments run by PSOE affiliates.
Targetting United Left
As Rubalcaba’s campaign entered its final days, it became clear that in attacking the PP he really had a different enemy in his sights ― the United Left (IU), which the polls showed was gaining support the longer the campaign went.
On this front too, the PSOE’s efforts boomeranged. A Rubalcaba government would raise taxes on upper income brackets. But why had the PSOE in office reduced that tax?
Why say nothing about taxing capital and next to nothing about the obscene scale of tax evasion? Why not just implement the exhaustive report of the tax inspectors’ union, as promised by IU?
Rubalcaba mumbled that it was too complicated and, anyway, a job for Brussels.
Next came the argument for the useful vote ― only the PSOE had a chance of turning opposition to the PP into government. A vote for IU (never mentioned by name) was wasted.
With millions of people disaffected with “the political class” and on the streets with 15-M, that argument sank like a stone.
In this atmosphere, the PSOE campaign couldn’t even hurt IU at its most vulnerable points, such as the implosion of its Basque affiliate Esker Batua in the face of the left-nationalist resurgence and the decision of its Extremadura leadership to allow, via abstention, a PP government to take office in that region.
The response of Extremadura voters was to almost double the IU vote to 5.7% ― an indication that, at least, they didn’t see that decision as a hanging offence.
The 1.68 million-strong vote for IU was not just the inevitable result of broad disaffection with the major parties, but also of its decision to connect its campaign to the protest movement.
Its election program was a developed through more than 500 open social assemblies, in which 15,000 people participated, and through a website promoting “a participatory process for a new political program for the left”.
That opened the door for the concerns of the 15-M movement to be reflected in the final election program, even as IU leaders took great care to explain that IU did not represent or speak for the movement.
At the same time, a few leading 15-M figures decided to accept the invitation to stand on IU lists, with one, economist Alberto Garzon, elected for Malaga.
Other left forces did less well. Equo, an attempt by former Greenpeace Spain director Juan Lopez de Uralde to build up a specifically green political force, won more than 200,000 votes, but was defeated by the undemocratic electoral system.
The attempt of the Anti-capitalist Left to give a direct political voice to the 15-M movement over and against IU will surely have disappointed it supporters: it won only 25,000 votes nationally (0.1%) with over half of those in Catalunya.
Of the 15% of the vote lost by the PSOE, about 5% went each to the PP and the left. The next biggest beneficiary was the Union for Progress and Democracy (UPYD) of ex-socialist Rosa Diez.
Proportionally, the UPYD vote rose even more than IU’s, especially in Spain’s Castilian heartlands.
With the PSOE so on the nose and the PP tainted by its Francoist and Catholic connections, this was only to be expected. The UPYD appeals to those who wish the national minorities, especially the Basques, would just drop their “obsessions” and allow Spain to become an up-to-date, efficient European state.
Part of the UPYD dope is that it alone represents democratic “modernity”, over and against the traditional clientalism of the right, left and national minorities.
The upshot in practical politics is a pot-pourri of progressive and reactionary positions ― a Spanish version of the Australian Democrats.
Inevitable fight
The undemocratic Spanish electoral system, in which some MPs get elected with 35,000 votes while others need over 110,000, guaranteed that the PP (who won 44.62% of the vote) would win an absolute majority of seats (53.2%).
On that basis, the Rajoy government will launch into its “you-ain’t-seen-nothing-yet” war on labour rights and public services.
The voting system gives a misleading snapshot of social and political sentiment, for it can seem that progressive-minded people are fewer and weaker than they actually are. In this poll, the vote for the two major parties fell by 10.46%, but they lost only 7.8% of seats.
If a proportional electoral system applied, it would also be clear that for every four PSOE voters, there’s an IU voter, not one for every 10 as the seat distribution would indicate.
The Indignant movement has made people a lot more aware of this shell-game. When this consciousness combines with the ongoing waves of protest against social vandalism and a Work Choices-style war on labour rights, a social explosion is almost certain.
With the left stronger inside parliament, pledging to “represent the streets” there, the November 20 PP landslide could just be opening the door to a powerful people’s fightback.
[Dick Nichols is the Green Left Weekly correspondent in Europe, based in Barcelona. A longer version of this article appears in Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal.]