[Marxism] Elections in the Spanish State: First Impressions (I)

["Ed George" <edgeorge1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

[For background information on political developments in the Spanish
state, the following three articles may be useful. The first is an
account of the last elections (of 2004) and the immediately preceding
events. It can be read here:
<http://www.workersaction.org.uk/27Articles/27_Spain.htm>. The second
is an en explanation of the centrality of the national question in
Spanish-state politics, here:
<http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2005w39/msg00256.htm>.
Both these themes are developed at greater length here
<http://www.geocities.com/edgeorge2001es/mywritings/atocha.html>,
where the Spanish transiciÃn is also dealt with in some detail.]


* * * * *


To paraphrase Connolly, elections are not the battle, but the echo of
the battle; but, being so, they can indicate to us certain lines of
political development. In this sense, then, certain features of the
elections held in the Spanish state on Sunday stand out.

First, the turnout (see table I.1 below [1]). At 75.3%, the turnout
stood only a shade below that of 2004 (75.7%). This is remarkable in
itself. In 2004, the turnout, not a record, but up 7 points, i.e. two
and half million votes, on the previous elections, could be put down
to the impact of the Atocha bombings and the resulting political
developments over the three days running up to the elections. What
explains the high turnout in 2008? On the Friday preceding the
election, ETA had assassinated a former Socialist Party councillor in
GuipÃzcoa, in the Basque Country. [2] The reaction of the mainstream
parties was practically uniform: end of campaign election rallies were
cancelled, and the attack was denounced as an 'attack on democracy'
(i.e. as an attack on the legitimacy of the Spanish state and its
constitution) and citizens were called on to vote on Sunday as an act
'in defence of democracy' and 'against terrorism'.

Can the high turnout be put down to this, then? It would be difficult
to demonstrate (for one would have to identify voters who were not
going to vote until Friday and then decided to do so), but there is
one strong piece of circumstantial evidence that would seem to support
the hypothesis. If the 'extra' turnout, provoked by the fallout of
Friday, was the result of a perceived need to defend 'democracy' (i.e.
Spanish state constitutionalism) then we would expect it to evidence
itself more strongly where ideological attachment to the Spanish state
as presently constituted is itself strongest (in a way different to
how the more complex electoral mobilisation of 2004 expressed itself).
And the fact is that the two electoral regions where turnout was
lowest were the Basque Country â at some 10 points below the
state-wide average â and Catalunya â four points: i.e. precisely
where, and in the same order, we would expect ideological affiliation
to the integrity of the Spanish state to be weakest (see tables III.1
and V). In fact, if we abstract the figures relating to the Basque
Country from the Spanish state average, as in table I.2, we see that,
the Basque Country excluded, the turnout on Sunday was higher than
that of 2004.

What would the consequence of all this be, were it true? It is
commonly held here in Spain that the right votes more consistently
than the left: that the right, motivated by sharper ideological
preferences, more consistently turns its vote out at elections than
the left, which is more likely to see its electoral base express
dissatisfaction through abstention. Now, the historical evidence does
not directly confirm this, though there does seem to be a general
trend linking higher overall electoral turnout with better left
electoral performance. And it is certainly the case that, from the
beginning of 2005 â i.e. immediately after the last post-election
honeymoon period, the opinion polls (and electoral polls are the most
accurate of all polls, given that they deal with a real statistical
event â elections â against which they can be calibrated) consistently
underestimated the Socialist Party share of the vote compared to that
of the PP compared to what eventually transpired on Sunday [3]. If all
this is the case, then, what the new Socialist government has to deal
with now is a 'democratic surplus' â those extra voters driven to the
polls by contingency â motivated by the defence of the present-day
Spanish-state constitutional set-up, i.e., in sharp contrast to 2004,
in which the 'extra' voters came onto the Zapatero project from the
left (a fact which surely explains the almost immediate announcement
of the withdrawal of the Spanish military contingent in Iraq). In
other words, the 'extra' democratic pressure now comes from the right
of the Socialist project, and would be expected to favour a restraint
of the government's stated intention to find a political (rather than
police or military) solution to the 'problem' of the nationalities
(and especially the Basque 'problem'). For the effect that this will
have on the new government's trajectory we will have to wait and see,
but, if the above speculations have any content of truth to them, they
can only be portentous.


* * * * *


Bearing this in mind, then, we are now in a position to see what the
election results can tell us about the relative strengths of the main
parties. At first sight (looking at table II.1) what appears to have
happened is a rise in the vote of the two main parties, marginal in
the case of the Socialist Party, a little more substantial in the case
of the PP, with the Communist Party's electoral front Izquierda Unida
(IU) losing substantially. This observation seems to concord with the
accepted wisdom amongst mainstream political commentators post-Sunday
that what really happened in the election was a polarisation, with the
big parties benefiting at the expense of the little ones. This is, in
its own way, true; but there remains the necessity to explain the
phenomenon: specifically, given the near parity in turnout between
2004 and 2008, where did the extra voters in the Socialist party and
PP's cases come from, and why?

There are two factors that we need to take account of if we want to
understand what happened to the Socialist Party vote. In 2007, the
Basque member of the European Parliament, and rabid Spanish
chauvinist, Rosa DÃez left the Socialist Party to set up the UniÃn,
Progreso y Democracia party (UPyD), specifically on the grounds that
the Socialist Party under Zapatero was too soft on the non-Spanish
Spanish state nationalities (especially on the Basques). 2008 was the
first time the party presented itself at the polls; although in most
electoral regions the new party only managed a marginal presence, DÃez
(the party's best-known, if not only-known, political figure, although
the party also counts on the support of the reactionary philosopher
Fernando Savater and, bizarrely, the writer Mario Vargas Llosa), who
stood in the party's list in Madrid, ended up elected to the Congreso
(the lower house of the Spanish parliament), and, in total, the party
won some 300,000 votes on a Spanish state scale, votes which could
only come from similarly inclined disaffected Socialist Party
supporters. If we add these votes to the PSOE total, we get the
figures that we see in table II.2.

Now we can see what happened to the 'left' vote in the election, for
while PSOE haemorrhaged votes to its right to UPyD, IU, led by former
Asturias Communist Party chief Gaspar Llamazares, a political figure â
perhaps the most dismal on the Spanish state political scene - for
whom the adjective 'anonymous' would be a complement, haemorrhaged
votes to PSOE. This latter is not difficult to understand: despite
situating itself as the 'party of protest on the streets', on paper IU
is hardly to the left of PSOE in programme, and remains, as it has
since its formation in the 1980s, with the unresolved problem of how
to operate principally as an electoral force to the left of mainstream
social democracy (strong shades of the dilemmas of the British state
Respect project here). Faced with the possibility of a resurgent PP
challenge to the Zapatero government, IU voters voted with their
brains and abandoned the sinking IU ship in almost exactly the same
numbers as those, unable to stomach the government's perceived
soft-peddling towards the non-Spanish nationalities, who had abandoned
Zapatero for DÃez.

IU's failure to carve out for itself a distinct place in the political
spectrum is surely not helped by the way that it has routinely fallen
in line in condemning, in constitutional terms, as 'criminal' each
action carried out by the Basque nationalist ETA. After the killing on
Friday, Llamazares continued the tradition by condemning 'terrorist
violence' and calling for 'the Estado de Derecho [literally the 'state
of law', although the English language is too historically influenced
by an Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence to convey accurately the import of the
expression] to apply itself against the terrorists' through 'the
application of the law through the judges and the security forces
[i.e. the police and the Guardia Civil]' and for 'the unity of the
forces of democracy' to bring about 'democratic normality'.

Elsewhere on the left, the two principal factions of the Greens
together garnered some 70,000 votes on a Spanish-state-wide basis; the
while the Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de EspaÃa, a split from the
mainsteam Communist Party, culled nearly 20,000 votes, with the
Spanish-state Lambertists bringing up the rear, in more senses than
one, with a little over 7,000.


* * * * *


Turning now to the principal party of the Spanish state right
(mercifully, openly fascist parties are almost totally quiescent,
pulling in a vote in elections even more derisory than that of the
would-be revolutionary left), the neo-clerical conservative Partido
Popular (PP), a number of things are clear. The 10 thousand plus votes
won by the PP on Sunday is, in terms of numbers of votes, a historic
high, and represents a social base as solid as it is ideologically
conservative (the map at the top right of this page
<http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/eleccionesgenerales.html> indicates
graphically the PP heartlands in the most traditionally politically
and culturally backward parts of the Spanish state: Madrid, the rural
central belt and rural Galicia). If, as I suggest, PP voters are the
most ideologically clear and electorally reliable, what is that they
vote for? In short, we can summarise this as 'traditional Spanish
values'; concretely, these days, the moral, ideological and
territorial integrity of the Spanish state. In this respect, the
Zapatero project is perceived by this sector of the Spanish population
as especially pernicious (although, and unfortunately, the perception
does rather overstate the reality). The principal grist in this mill
has been the Socialists' reforms of the marriage laws (removing all
references to gender in the legislation, thus de facto permitting gay
marriage, as well as measures to ease the divorce process) and its
attempts to negotiate a settlement with ETA (although in this respect
the Socialist Party has done nothing more, although with no more
success, and in fact done it rather less secretively, than previous
governments of the PP). Increasingly, and a portent for the future,
the question of immigration has received more emphasis in political
debate (the statistics are not especially reliable, but some estimates
put the percentage of the Spanish state population classified as
foreign-born at around 15%; and, in addition, immigration is a
relatively recent phenomenon â during the 60s, 70s and early 70s the
boot was decidedly on the other foot as Spaniards themselves emigrated
in search of a better life). In addition, in recent times the PP
electorate has not only shown its willingness to vote, but also to
take to the streets: on a number of occasions â against negotiations
with ETA, in defence of the 'family' â the PP, aided and abetted by
the Church (an organisation which it would be unwise to underestimate,
though this, both inside and outside Spain, is widely done) and the
ultra-nationalist AsociaciÃn VÃctimas del Terrorismo, either
organised, or participated heavily in, mass demonstrations, in which
the paraphernalia of Spanish nationalism â the Spanish flag, including
in its pre-transiciÃn form, and the national anthem (which is
prohibited on political demonstrations by law) much in evidence.

While there seems to be no really clear pattern as to where the PP's
extra votes came from on Sunday - other than that it appears to be the
case that the party generally polled a little up on 2004 in the south,
for example in AndalucÃa, Valencia, Castilla-La Mancha and Murcia, and
down in the north: in Asturias, Cantabria, Castilla y LeÃn and Galicia
(the PP also lost votes in Catalunya and the Basque Country) - the
fact that a good part of the PP's gain on Sunday came from Madrid
poses an interesting problem for the party in the coming period. For
the most visible face of the party here is the city's mayor Alberto
Ruiz GallardÃn, and GallardÃn is the most prominent figure of the
'left' of the PP. Now, even if the distinction between 'left' and
'right' in the PP is far more a question of style than substance, the
fact is that GallardÃn â urbane, intelligent and personable â enjoys a
high popularity rating outside of the party's inner circles, and when
the PP sits down next month to decide its post-electoral future, and
specifically who will be its leader and probable prime ministerial
candidate for 2012, the fact that the party performed above par in
GallardÃn's fiefdom will surely concentrate minds. For the moment, the
present leader, Mariano Rajoy, has declared his intention to continue
in the post, and the fact that the votes won by the party on Sunday
represent a historic high will surely count in his favour; but it is
also the case that should the party see the need to break out of its
traditional heartlands a political figurehead more of the GallardÃn
type may prove of more use than the kind of blunt instrument â Fraga,
Aznar, Rajoy himself â preferred by the party up till now. Whether the
GallardÃn camp will see the present as the opportune moment to make a
bid for leadership in the party remains to be seen, however.


* * * * *
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