Will Spain’s Left Unity Stem The Far Right Tide?
This past Sunday, Spain held its general elections for the second time in 2019. For this past year, the country has been gripped by political instability, as its internal divisions have kept the balance of parliamentary power hanging on a knife’s edge. What has concerned many observers in Spain and internationally is that these elections signaled the arrival (or, more accurately, the return) of right-wing populism to the Iberian peninsula. Faced with the rise of the far right eclipsing the center right for the first time since the fall of General Franco’s regime in 1975, the factions of the Spanish left have come to an unprecedented coalition agreement, hoping to stave them off. While neighboring Portugal shows the promise of this tactic in cementing a progressive political bloc, the new Spanish government will be under especially heavy pressure to live up to its promises in order to avoid the continued rise of populism.
The first signs of the far right’s return to Spanish politics were already in evidence well before this month’s elections. Vox, a far-right party whose leader has called for “a new Reconquista” of the country from Muslim immigrants, split off from the mainstream right party, the People’s Party, in 2013, calling it not just too soft on immigration but also criticizing it for ceding too much autonomy to Spain’s various regions, particularly Catalonia. Perhaps even more than immigration, it was the latter issue that fueled the party’s rise.
For the first few years of its existence was a negligible electoral force even as populism was on the rise elsewhere in Europe, but that changed in late 2017. That October, the region of Catalonia voted to secede from Spain and establish itself as an independent state, despite the fact that the central government in Madrid ruled that the referendum was illegal. This set off a constitutional crisis, as Catalonia’s regional parliament quickly voted to formalize its independence. The Spanish government in Madrid, taking a page out of Andrew Jackson’s playbook, challenged the Catalonians to enforce their decision.
The Madrid government then suspended Catalonia’s regional autonomy and invoked direct rule. Outraged the people of Catalonia took to the streets with massive protests, which the Spanish government then retaliated to with a scene that could have been straight out of the Arab Spring or Ferguson, Mississippi. Spanish police engaged in a brutal crackdown, and police also occupied Catalonia’s regional parliament. Catalonia has remained in a state of tension since then, with the most recent crackdown taking place in October of 2019.
This response by the People’s Party government and its Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, although seemingly shocking and heavy-handed, was in fact not nearly enough for a large section of Spanish nationalists. They viewed the Catalonian referendum as an attack on the very Spanish nation, and as a leftist hotbed besides, dating back to the days of the Spanish Civil War.
Over the next several months, Vox’s support would increase exponentially. In the 2016 general election it received less than 50,000 votes nationwide, roughly one fifth of one percent of the vote. But as the Catalonian crisis erupted in 2017 and persisted through 2018, they would greatly increase their vote share in local and regional elections. During the first election of 2019, they gained enough of the vote to enter the Spanish Parliament for the first time. Meanwhile, the unpopular and beleaguered Rajoy was ousted from power in a vote of no confidence in June 2018, giving way to Pedro Sanchez of the center-left PSOE (Socialist Workers Party).
The PSOE has been on shaky parliamentary ground ever since Sanchez came into power, holding less than half of the seats in Spain’s Chamber of Deputies (the equivalent of the U.K.’s House of Commons). Sanchez called the election hoping that voters would rally to PSOE and give them a mandate to end Spain’s political instability, but the opposite happened. PSOE lost three seats, while Vox more than doubled its share of support, becoming the third largest party in the Chamber of Deputies. PSOE no longer had enough support to continue on as a minority government. One option would be to form a “grand coalition” with the People’s Party, along the lines of Germany’s alliance between Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. But that would leave Vox as the official opposition, only increasing their prestige and influence.
Instead, Sanchez and PSOE turned to an ally that would have seemed obvious but had in fact been considered unlikely. Unidas Podemos (United We Can) is the rough Spanish equivalent of the Bernie Sanders movement in the U.S. or the Momentum faction of the British Labour Party (which backs Jeremy Corbyn). It was formed when several smaller left-wing parties came together to unite in a backlash against the austerity that has been the economic order of the day in Spain ever since the financial crisis of 2008. Podemos had previously refused to work with PSOE, blaming it in part for having imposed austerity, a charge that is not entirely without merit. However, both sides clearly recognize the threat that Vox poses, and thus they have agreed to form a coalition.
There is a blueprint for how this coalition can succeed right next door to Spain on the Iberian Peninsula. In 2015, the Portuguese general election was also dominated by the austerity issue, to the benefit of several left wing parties. Previously, the harder left had been critical of the center-left Socialist Party’s previous trends towards a Portuguese version of the politics espoused by the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. However, the two largest hard left parties, the nearly hundred year old Communist Party and the newer, Podemos-esque Bloco Esquerda (Left Bloc), agreed to support the Socialist candidate for Prime Minister, Antonio Costa, in return for a concrete reversal of austerity economics.
The results, despite the fears of many political centrists in Portugal and Europe as a whole, have proven to be remarkably positive, a success story that could serve as a model blueprint for how the current Spanish government could operate going forward. However, Portugal does not have an issue as divisive as Catalonia- Pedro Sanchez remains opposed to Catalonian separatism, while Podemos is deeply divided on the Catalonian issue, forcing its leader Pablo Iglesias to awkwardly triangulate in his public statements.
The Spanish coalition government has a unique opportunity to show once again that neoliberal, austerity economics is not the sole path forward for Europe, one that should be welcomed. But it will have an extremely difficult path forward juggling Spain’s unique national questions. Their success could be a model for a prosperous but economically progressive Europe, but if they cannot come to a unified position on the Catalonian issue, then Spain will continue to become yet another breeding ground for right wing populism.
