A white line across the Pyrenees?
HAS Felipe González's recent election victory bucked the trend of
European politics? Since 1989 — or more specifically, since the beginning of the current recession — we have seen the decline of social democracy
International Viewpoint #247 July 1993 and the accelerated rise of the right.
stantially alter his objectives.
As such, the current situation bears little resemblance to that which was predicted.
And, most importantly, in the socio-political atmosphere which has been created, the left
The deputy leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE),
Alfonso Guerra, said that the election had drawn a "white line" across the Pyrenees. The message to the European right: "You can go no does not have the wind in its sails. For now at least, a PSOE-IU agreement does not seem very credible. And if one were to come about in the current climate, it is clear further." MIGUEL ROMERO*— Madrid, June 21, 1993
F the election result was an exception it had more to do with the form than the substance of the matter. The enthusiastic messages of congratulations that González received from German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, French rightwing leader Giscard D'Estaing (who also made a kind of "self-criticism" for having participated in a campaign meeting of the People's Party (PP) candidate, José Maria Aznar), and British Prime Minister John Major were more than simple gestures of diplomatic courtesy.
González is one of their kind. Fundamentally, he shares their political programme, their vision of the world, their value system and their material interests. Since 1982, he has transcended political traditions and currents, and has managed four times in a row to be the candidate receiving the most support from the Spanish and European establishments. He has not betrayed this confidence.
Many reasonable forecasts predicted that election day would be the end of the political cycle begun in 1982 — euphemistically described as "the socialist decade". All the pre-election enquiries came to the same three conclusions: the loss of the PSOE's absolute parliamentary majority; the possibility of a "technical draw" with the PP or even that of a marginal rightwing victory; and a significant increase in support for the United Left (IU) who would get at least as many seats as the best score of the Communist Party of Spain (23 deputies in 1979) and perhaps get as many as 30 deputies and 15% of the popular vote. These predictions foresaw a particularly difficult situation after
* The author is a member of the Spanish revolutionary organisation Izquierda Alternativa (Alternative Left).
the elections. Nevertheless, there would be possibilities for organising a social resistance which would push politics to the left.
In fact, of the three conclusions drawn by forecasters only one was actually correct, and then only partially at that: the PSOE indeed lost its absolute majority (formerly, 176 deputies; in reality, a few less due to the non-participation of the deputies of the radical Basque nationalist organization, Herri Batasuna (HB)), but it got nearly 160 deputies (which corresponds to the most optimistic expectations of the party at the beginning of the campaign) and put a comfortable distance between itself and the PP.
The PSOE will have considerable room for manoeuvre in parliament, allowing it to make a wide assortment of coalitions and agreements on its left and right. It could even try to go it alone as a minority government.
For its part, the PP made significant gains in both qualitative and quantitative terms. In particular, it now appears as a credible governmental alternative — something which no rightwing force has been able to do since the beginning of the post-Franco transition. But for the moment it has to be happy with being in opposition. In the new parliament it cannot assemble a coalition to defeat González. Its strategy will probably be to force the holding of early elections.
The results of the IU fell well below its expectations and this has produced a feeling of collapse in the coalition. This is rather excessive given the actual number of votes
In the coming period, the PSOE will continue to run Spanish politics. While in a weaker position than in the past, González is not obliged for parliamentary reasons to subthat this would imply more of a rightward drift of the IU than a leftward drift of the PSOE.
At the same time, there are intense pressures for the signing of a social pact - pressures from Gonzales himself, from the big media (especially from the powerful group headed up by the daily El País) and from the major corporations. This has not failed to have an impact on significant layers of the major unions, where the "culture of the pact" has made headway, in spite of the devastation it caused in the workers movement into the mid-1980s.
It might seem paradoxical that a victory of the "left" should provoke a "right" dynamic. The paradox only exists if one takes the PSOE's name seriously. If, however, the party is judged according to what it is and what it does, there is no paradox whatso-
In the euphoria of election night, a PSOE leader declared, "If they haven't defeated us now, they will never defeat us." To be sure, Felipe Gonzales called the elections at a critical time: the highest unemployment rate in the European Community (more than 22% of the active population and three million unemployed); a serious recession which has led to the application of a severe economic policy of "adjustment" which will last at least until the end of 1994; a series of corruption scandals that have openly implicated the central apparatus of the PSOE in illegal operations of partyfinancing and have created multi-millionaires overnight out of a number of former party leaders, friends, leaders and collaborators; public factional struggles between the so-called "renovator" current of the party — those loyal to President González— and the "official" current led by Alfonso Guerra who threatened González with a revolt of the parliamentary group against the government; and, finally, a significant change in the leadership of the Spanish right, which is
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International Viewpoint #247 July 1993 now in the hands of young and ambitious politicians who don't have a Francoist background and present themselves as centrists.
How then can the PSOE's victory be explained? In the first place, it is important to underline the exact meaning of this victory. In terms of votes, there was a difference of less than one million votes, or 4% of votes cast. A small swing to the right would have handed victory to the PP.
Taken together, the PP and the PSOE received 74% of votes, a significant proportion in a country with a relatively proportional electoral system, and where there are nationalist forces in government in Euskadi (Basque country) and in Catalonia. But there is no clear sociological difference between their two electorates. The PP is stronger among workers with jobs, those looking for their first job and students.
The PSOE is dominant among the unemployed, the retired and housewives. One feature that stands out is the strength of the right among youth voting for the first time: the PP got more than 34% of this group's votes, while the PSOE got less than 30%, and the IU 13%. These figures should, perhaps, be taken with a pinch of salt given the notorious incompetence of Spanish firms engaged in the dubious field of electoral
Nevertheless, there is a clear difference between the urban PP majority vote and the rural PSOE majority. The PP won 39 out of 50 provincial capitals, but in the most populous ones the victories were only slight and in some (Barcelona, Sevilla, Bilbao) the PSOE won by a significant margin.
There has been a widely-defended argument attributing the PSOE victory to a "subsidised vote". The very notion of a "subsidised vote" - or, worse still, "captive vote" — is particularly offensive, especially as it is dressed up in sociological pretence. Spain is a country with more than eight million people living under the poverty line, more than three million unemployed, thousands of agricultural workers condemned to seasonal work, thousands of industrial workers threatened by restructuring, and a pension system which sets the minimum wage as an upper limit for payments to retired workers. To treat people who need "subsidies" to live so contemptuously, is worse than reactionary.
Probably a majority of abandoned workers considered the PSOE to be a better choice, or at least a lesser evil, than the right. But it would be a gross simplification to say that this is the main electoral base of the
To understand González's victory, it is necessary to go beyond traditional political and social explanations. This victory reflects neither any fundamental class feeling nor any particular identification with the left. It 10 is better explained as a product of the "social climate" — in particular, of the various fears
In the first place, there is the fear of the right. In a rather frivolous fashion, many on the radical left treated the PSOE and the PP as equivalents. For the great majority of people, in a country where the adult population recalls forty years of dictatorship, this is not the case — and with good reason.
If the PP had won, a José María Aznar government would not have implemented an excessively different policy to that of González. But the right is not only in the government; there is a right and a far-right in public administration, in the judiciary, the army, the media and the police. They would have seen a PP victory as their own, and the results would have been unmistakable.
Moreover, there is a right and a far-right in the towns and neighbourhoods, who on the eve of the election went around "flexing their muscles". There were shadows of revenge and many people were frightened. Gonzalez used these fears with great finesse in his television debates with Aznar, by revealing with great ease the PP's candidates lack of concrete proposals.
He asked Aznar again and again, "What is your real programme, Señor Aznar? What would you really do if you won the elections?" The question must have sent shivers down many people's spines. It is difficult to quantify the effects of this fear, given (as we noted above) the unreliable nature of figures produced by Spanish polling firms. Nevertheless, it is significant that an estimated 2.7 million of those who abstained in 1989 voted this time around: 60% of them voted for the PSOE, 37% for the PP and only
1.9% for IU.
This is to say that of the 900,000 votes that the PSOE got over the PP, we can say that 600,000 come from former abstentionists. This fear of the right had a particularly pronounced effect among potential IU voters. As of now, there are no clear estimates, but people in IU are talking about a last minute flight of 500,000 IU voters to the PSOE, but this figure does not come from the most neutral of sources. Nonetheless, many on the left know people who confess to having changed their vote from IU to PSOE, practically on their way to the polling
Fear of instability also played an important part. And many people equated instability with the defeat of the González government. Gonzalez himself played this card to full effect, declaring that if the PP came out ahead he would not be the presidential candidate for any kind of coalition government. This indirect request for a plebiscite on his personal leadership once again produced
The personal standing of González is one of the central features of the Spanish political situation. In and of itself, this is proof of the state of disarray and weakness of collective aspirations and the lack of autonomy from public institutions. González is conscious of this situation and he takes risks to squeeze the maximum benefit from it; and the greatest risk he takes is the distance he places between himself and the apparatus of his party.
In this sense, his most spectacular gesture during the campaign was to make the judge Baltasar Garzón — a man with an incorruptible image who has frequently cla-
International Viewpoint #247 July 1993 shed with the PSOE apparatus and the government in the area of corruption and civil rights — his deputy in Madrid. In general, it is clear that the PSOE vote is first and foremost a presidential vote for González.
Most people did not want a change; but this observation needs to be examined in more detail.
There are two counterposed interpretations of the electoral results which can both be dismissed. The first says that the decline of the PSOE was much less than was thought and that, in fact, there is a high level of satisfaction with its policies. This is now the official creed of the PSOE apparatus and it is backed up with some touched up statistics.
To be sure, a majority of Spanish society now have a standard of living considered acceptable and worth defending; the hope for radical change is very much reduced. But, particularly as a consequence of unemployment - the fact that it increasingly affects heads of families, that it is growing amongst skilled and administrative workers and that it is more and more difficult to get a first job - there has been a perceptible spread of social malaise.
There is a pronounced lack of confidence in González's ability to confront these problems, but the majority of people do not see any better alternative. For the fifty year-old worker who has seen the places where they have worked and lived - and suffered a thousand defeats - converted into a desert, getting a "soft reconversion" might appear a lesser evil. But this does not mean that they have forgotten who is responsible for the destruction of their job.
As for corruption, it would be unfair to say that the level of cynicism in society is such that the question is seen as unimportant, since "everyone is a thief". The problem is that people do not have any vehicle to intervene autonomously in these conflicts; in such conditions, they choose to elect the least dishonest "leader" possible.
Another interpretation is that the results are a popular mandate to undertake a "change in the change", in the fleeting words of González, or a "turn to the left", as called for by the the major unions and, especially, the IU. It is obvious that González is not planning to undertake major changes in his orientation, even though there will certainly be a change in methods and image, whose degree will depend on whether a coalition is forged with the nationalist parties.
It is much more interesting to examine the IU position. Julio Anguita, the undisputed leader of the coalition, has said that the electoral results of the IU were almost "heroic" given the pressure from the two main parties. This is not a convincing explanation. In this country — except in the event of a highly unlikely left turn of the PSOE, leading to an electoral accord — a formation such as the IU can only make significant electoral growth by transcending the twoparty pressure.
Indeed, Anguita himself expressed this imperative during the electoral campaign, saying that, "the PSOE has to lose the elections to the left and not to the right." The most social-democratic sectors of his organisation (whose strength is not minimal; Anguita only received 63% of votes from the IU leadership for his nomination to the "presidential candidate" of the coalition) now accuse him of "ultra-leftism" for having used such formulas during the campaign.
Nevertheless, it was correct to take such a stance, both politically and electorally speaking. A more unitary approach towards the PSOE would have been politically absurd and very unproductive in terms of gathering additional votes.
In the end, the IU result was not bad. though somewhat uneven. It got a excellent result in Madrid (more than 450,000 votes, or 15%); it significantly increased its score in the Basque Country (while not getting any deputies elected); it basically maintained its percentage of votes in Catalonia, and its score moderately declined in Andalucia (where it got 400,000 votes).
If there is any talk of collapse, this is more in relation to expectations than to past results. But the expectations fuelled thoughts of a significant change in the socio-political approach of the IU. These varied from thoughts of securing influence in the government", repeatedly declared by Anguita, or playing a more dynamic role in the recomposition of the left. For the moment, none of these effects have been produced by the election results. What happens in the future depends on social and political experiences, and not on the parliamentary group of the IU.
Anguita is a very particular kind of political personality. One of his most famous characteristics is his insistence on the importance of programme ("programme, programme, programme" is one of his well-known declarations), while in truth it can be said that he is the programme of the IU. In other words, the actual programme of the IU does not provoke great interest, not even within the coalition. Anguita's speeches and positions provide the "true" image and reality of the programme.
The contradictions are many. He has an essentially syndicalist approach, with hardly any place left for the demands of the social movements (including ecological demands, which could interest IU for electoral reasons - Anguita can not be called an electoralist). At the same time, in a meeting with the business community he can be seen repeating the standard refrain about the "most dynam-ic sectors" who can "get the country out of the situation it is going through".
He proposes rather serious measures to share work and for the reduction of the working day - which, however, include a reduction in salaries. It can be said that he defends goals which are anti-capitalist, but he is a real devotee of the Spanish Constitution (which, among other things, seriously limit his proposals around the rights of the different nationalities).
He can call for strict democratic norms within the left, while at the same time treating minority rights with considerable disdain.
He can make extravagant speeches. For example, in Asturias — one of the most hard hit regions by the crisis, where until very recently the IU participated in the autonomous government run by the PSOE - he declared, "Miners, steelworkers, and peasants, when have we failed you? Give us strength!"
But he can also make clear arguments, a rarity with leaders in his tradition, such as, "I do not want an increased number of parliamentary deputies that does not lead to an increase in social consciousness". The problem is not only that Anguita "does not want", it is most probable that a significant increase in IU's parliamentary strength in heavily bi-polar elections, with a line that is clearly to the left of the PSOE, could only come as a product of a change in the relationship of forces in society.
There has been no such change, and the results of June 6 have nothing to do with a "popular mandate" to form a PSOE-IU coalition nor to make a left turn. There is perhaps a considerable amount of popular sympathy with the idea of a PSOE-IU agreement, in part because this would imply a certain amount of pressure on the PSOE and in part because of the lack of confidence in a coalition government between González and the Catalan and Basque nationalists
For the moment, González feels strong. He is seriously trying to make a programmatic agreement with those willing to submit to his hegemony. In the medium-term, things could change. Hope for a PSOE-IU coalition, which would have an absolute parliamentary majority, might garner increased influence in the future. But experience has taught us that it would be a negative development for this possibility to appear as the mythical solution to all the problems of working people.
The elections are over and they have not left a particularly favourable environment for those to the left of the PSOE. To borrow a phrase from Anguita: the need of the hour is to "increase the social consciousness". *
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