United Left makes gains in Spain
By Jaime Pastor
MADRID — The United Left (UL), based on the former Communist Party but which includes a wide spectrum of the left, scored a major success in the June 12 European elections with 13.4% of the vote. In the regional elections in Andalusia, held on the same day, the UL scored nearly 20% in a dynamic alliance with the Greens.
The Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez suffered a big defeat. The right wing Popular Party (PP) profited from the crisis in the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE) which is bogged down in numerous corruption scandals.
The great efforts made by UL to combat the austerity politics of Gonzalez's government during the last few years got their reward in these elections. In absolute terms, the UL vote didn't go up very much from the June 1993 general election (2,246,000 to 2,483,000). But the significance of the vote is much more than the absolute figure suggests.
Compared to the general election, the turnout for the European elections was much lower, giving the UL a higher percentage of the vote (13.4% as against 9.57%). This is larger than any other vote for a formation to the left of the PSOE since 1977.
The European elections played a much bigger role in Spanish domestic politics than in most European countries because of the corruption scandals which have engulfed the government.
These scandals were demagogically exploited by the PP, which, in its attempt to scoop up the anti-Gonzalez vote, tried to appear as the guardian of moral propriety.
Faced with this prospect the PSOE tried, with little success, to whip up a scare campaign against the dangers of the right — pointing out that supporters of the former dictator General Franco are central to the PP.
The UL defended a program hostile to the Maastricht treaty (which implies moves towards European capitalist integration and European-wide austerity).
However, it presented a list of candidates which caused a lot of controversy. The top two positions on the list were people from its most moderate wing. In the end that didn't really matter, because the UL's best known leader and key spokesperson at its meetings, Julio Anguita, presented a very radical critique of the government's austerity policies which have led to 25% unemployment. Anguita correctly presented the UL as the sole left wing alternative in the elections.
Perhaps Anguita didn't put enough emphasis on the ecological and internationalist themes in the UL's program or stress enough the fight against corruption. But given the moderation of some of the leading UL candidates, his radicalism was important.
The judgment of the liberal daily El Pais is revealing: the campaign of the UL, it said, was "moderate in form and very radical in fundamental content" which "appeared to come from another age" (a reference to the 1970s when the Communist Party was strong).
The UL's results in the Andalusian regional parliamentary elections went from 12.6% in 1990 to 19.18% on June 12 (and from 11 MPs to 20 out of a total of 109). This progress was possible because of the presence on the UL list of a charismatic leader of the farm workers' union and two local leaders of the Greens.
This is the first time that Green deputies have been elected to a regional parliament in Spain. It is also important because it begins to open the possibility of ecologist and green currents coming into the UL in the near future.
The PSOE lost its absolute majority in the Andalusian parliament and will have to rely on the UL. But the local UL leaders will make no pacts with the rightist PSOE.
At a national level we must build on the gains made in these elections. We must continue to campaign for the resignation of Gonzalez, who has lost all legitimacy, and against the anti-worker legislation which led to the January 28 general strike. At the same time the UL has to show itself to be the force capable of regrouping the different currents of the anti-capitalist left and other movements for social change.
[Abridged from the French socialist paper Rouge. Jaime Pastor is a member of the United Left in Madrid.]