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

["Ed George" <edgeorge1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

Such lies the electoral map of 'Spanish' Spain. We do need also to
take into account developments in the non-Spanish parts of the Spanish
state, where politics follow a different rhythm.

Tables III.1, III.2 and III.3 summarise the electoral results in the
Basque Country. As I have already noted, the turnout here was the
lowest, and by some considerable distance, of the Spanish state
electoral regions. But table III.2 demonstrates that the Basque
abstention was far from even with respect to the different parties.
Who stayed away on Sunday, then, and why?

It has to be borne in mind here that politics in the Basque Country
are not driven by the same left-right PSOE-PP paradigm that operates
in most of the rest of the Spanish state. Here, the PP and PSOE â or,
more accurately in the latter case the PSE, Partido Socialista de
Euskadi, its nominally independent Basque wing â form not opposites on
the political scale but shades within one wing of the political
spectrum, a wing which is resolutely opposed to any deepening of
Basque self-government and is marked, especially since the late 1980s,
by a profound antipathy towards any manifestation of Basque
nationalism. Ranged against this Spanish-state axis in Basque politics
stands the continuum of Basque nationalism, which extends from the
moderate constitutional nationalists of the Partido Nacionalista Vasco
(PNV) to the radical independentists, collectively known as the
'abertzales', best represented by the currently illegalised Batasuna.
[4]

The most convenient way to understand the electoral movement in the
Basque Country is thus to see the various parties in relation to the
political divide over Basque self-government and self-determination,
with those parties that maintain a formal (even if sometimes it is
only formal) commitment to self-determination on one side (what I am
calling the 'Lizarra' bloc â after the pact of the same name, signed
by PNV, EA, EB and the then Herri Batasuna in 1998, which concretised
the party-political configuration of Basque politics which obtains
today â and those who oppose it, which I dub the 'Spanish state' bloc,
namely the PSE and the PP. This is summarised in table III.3, from
which we can draw the following conclusions. First, we can see a
substantial rise in the votes of the Spanish state bloc. This is not
perhaps especially surprising: perhaps we can nuance my hypothesis
regarding the effect on turnout of Friday's assassination and
speculate that the bloc of Spanish-state voters who would be most
likely to react as a consequence of it would precisely be the
Spanish-state bloc in the Basque Country, and it is certainly true
that of all the shades of centralising Spanish-state chauvinism the
most chauvinistic will be found among the ranks of the PSE and PP in
the Basque country. [5]

But what of the 'Lizarra' bloc? The precipitous collapse of the Basque
nationalist vote cannot be explained simply by a disinterest in
registering a 'democratic protest' vote against ETA: there must be
something else going on as well. What this is can only, of course, be
speculation, but I am going to speculate like this.

At the last elections for the regional Basque government, in 1995, on
the table was a document that has come to be known as the 'plan
Ibarretxe' [6], named after its proposer, the Basque lehendakari
(first minister), the PNV's Juan Josà Ibarretxe. The plan proposed,
amongst other measures, that the existing Spanish Basque Country would
have what it called 'associate sovereign status' with Spain, and that
it would have the right to determine its own relations, not only with
the rest of Spain as a whole, but with other Basque territories,
including Navarra and the French Basque territories, and with other
nations, the European Union, etc. The plan also envisaged a popular
referendum on its status, and consequently on the status of the
Spanish Basque Country within the Spanish state. These proposals were
revolutionary (and I am not trying to be hyperbolic) for two reasons:
first, because it posited the decision as to the Spanish Basque
country's relations with other nations (including Spain) as a decision
independent of Madrid; and, second, through proposing a popular
referendum on this which would be openly and deliberately
anti-constitutional. But the plan floundered: at the last Basque
elections, in 2005, in an extraordinarily crass (but nevertheless
typical) act of sectarianism the abertzale left stood against the PNV,
effectively blocking the formation of a majority PNV administration
and leaving the plan Ibarretxe high and dry. Hampered by this lack of
institutional legitimacy, mainstream Basque nationalism has found
itself effectively paralysed; and it is this political paralysis that
provides the context within which ETA currently operates. It is not
possible, in my opinion, not to see the Basque nationalist abstention
on Sunday as anything other than a 'punishment vote' on the part of
this section of the electorate on all shades of Basque nationalist
opinion provoked by the current state of stalemate of Basque politics.


* * * * *


There is one last area that merits mentioning. Tables IV.1 and IV.2
deal with Catalunya, and it is clear from table IV.2 that something of
a party political realignment is here taking place. Yet if Basque
politics follow a different rhythm to Spanish ones, Basque and Spanish
politics feed off one another, to the extent that the Basques' Spanish
problem is the defining element in the Basque political scene, and the
Basque question (which is really in summary the 'Spanish question') is
the pivot on which Spanish state politics in the broader sense turns.
Catalan politics, on the other hand, simply march to the beat of a
different drum, independently of what happens in the rest of the
Spanish state (and the reasons for this I have explained in the
articles referenced above): Catalan matters of state and Spanish
matters of state only impinge on one another in periods of grave
crisis. Thus, as interesting as it may be, the long-term shifts in
Catalan politics necessarily remain outside of the scope of these
notes; I hope to have the time to return to them in the future.


* * * * *


Thus stands the post March 9 electoral map in the Spanish state. While
it is a relief to many of us who live here that the PP has been
relegated to a further four years of political opposition, there is
little else for a revolutionary socialist to be happy about. For the
re-election of Zapatero's Socialist Party may turn out to be something
of a poison chalice. For Spanish social democracy, as the inheritor of
the mantle of Spanish liberalism, is at heart a centralising,
chauvinist party, an irredeemably 'Spanish' party, and, as such, finds
itself as locked into the constitutional settlement of 1978 as any
other force in mainstream Spanish politics. And it is Spanish
socialism's unconditional affiliation to this settlement that is both
its raison d'Ãtre and its greatest, and most deadly, weakness, for
when this ideological affiliation is challenged, it finds itself
automatically in a bloc with the Spanish right, to the latter's
perennial advantage. Zapatero has survived the last four years,
essentially, because the Spanish economy, buoyant on the back of low
wages, chronic and endemic labour insecurity and a trade-union
movement for whom the label sycophantic would be kind has carried him
along. But when the economic wheels fall off â and already the bolts
are working loose, and an alarming knocking noise can be heard
emanating from the engine - then all bets will be off. It may well be
true that PSOE is the home for what Walter Lippmann here called the
'more forward-looking elements' in Spanish society; more to the point
it also has been, and will prove itself to be again, a ruthless
defender of the cultural, ideological and territorial integrity of the
Spanish state against all-comers, be these Basques, immigrants, trade
unionists. The 'democratic surplus' wrought by Friday and expressed on
Sunday already stands as a warning to the new government; and the
ideological capitulation and electoral disappearance of the 'left of
the left' indicates that now the constitutional consensus is near
hegemonic. It needs to be said again that the Spanish state working
class is like a rat caught in a trap of its own making, and until it
realises that not everything it has done can be defended it will find
no escape.


LeÃn, Thursday, 13 March 2008




* * * * *

-----
NOTES
-----

[1] All statistics have been compiled from the Spanish Interior
Ministry's website (<http://www.mir.es/>): I have not had time to
check them, so they should for the moment only be taken as indicative
and not cited. The official results are in any case provisional until
the formal routine recount â underway at the time of writing â and the
reckoning of overseas votes take place.

[2] It is, in my opinion, necessary for revolutionary socialists to
condemn this assassination, but we should do so in terms completely
different to those of the mainstream political parties. In
contradistinction to constitutionalist handwringing of the latter, who
condemn such acts as 'criminal' and 'cowardly', we should point out
that the only 'criminal' element here is the political stupidity and
military incompetence with which they are carried out. The hard truth
is that ETA is nowadays so logistically debilitated and politically
disorientated that it is incapable of targeting any but the very
softest of targets, a state of affairs which only adds grist to the
Spanish chauvinist mill. Independently of the desirability or
otherwise of waging a military campaign in the first place, if it
turns out to be the case that ETA is incapable of targeting the real
representatives of the Spanish state, then frankly it should abandon
such actions until it is. It sad, in this respect, to see the reaction
to Friday's killing of the former revolutionaries of the Spanish-state
Usec organisation, who were only capable of condemning it as 'a
criminal act' directed at 'all citizens [sic]' (see:
<http://www.espacioalternativo.org/node/2684>).

[3] See 
<http://www.elmundo.es/especiales/2008/02/espana/elecciones2008/graficos/encuesta05012008.html>
for a representative example of the evolution of the intention to vote
in the opinion polls.

[4] The other parties composing this spectrum are Eusko Alkatasuna
(EA), a split from the PNV dating to 1986, but a party cut from the
same political cloth as the PNV such that it has stood alongside them
as part of a joint electoral ticket in a number of Basque elections;
and Aralar, which split from Batasuna in 2000 because of its
disagreement with the ETA military campaign (in 2004 Aralar stood on a
joint ticket with Zutik, the organisation founded in the Basque
Country through the fusion of the Basque Usec organisation with the
neo-Maoist Communist Movement of Euskadi). The situation is
complicated a little by the anomalous position that Ezker Batua (EB),
the Basque wing of Izquierda Unida, holds. EB is the only section of
IU in the Spanish state in which the Communist Party is a minority; EB
has not only supported, but participated in â to great dismay at IU
headquarters in Madrid - with ministerial positions, the last two
Basque governments formed by PNV and EA, against which parliamentary
opposition is formed by a de facto bloc between the PSE and the PP.

[5] 'I also fear that comrade Dzerzhinsky, who went to the Caucasus to
investigate the "crime" of these "national-socialists", distinguishes
himself there by his truly Russian frame of mind (it is common
knowledge that people of other nationalities who have become Russified
overdo this Russian frame of mind).' V. I. Lenin, 'The Question of
Nationalities or "Autonomisation"' (1922), Collected Works vol. 36
(Moscow, 1966), p. 606.

[6] 'Propuesta de Estatuto PolÃtico de la Comunidad de Euskadi',
<http://www.elmundo.es/documentos/2003/10/estatuto_vasco.pdf>; an
English translation can be read here:
<http://www.nuevoestatutodeeuskadi.net/docs/dictamencomision20122004_eng.pdf>.


* * * * *


--------------------
STATISTICAL APPENDIX
--------------------

I  SPANISH STATE

I.1  Turnout

                   2004         2008

Electorate      34,571,831   33,875,268
Turnout (votes) 26,155,436   25,514,671
Turnout (%)         75.66%       75.32%


I.2 Turnout excluding Basque Country

                   2004         2008

Electorate      32,767,894   32,136,358
Turnout (votes) 24,803,102   24,386,191
Turnout (%)         75.69%       75.88%





II  SPANISH-STATE PARTIES

II.1  PSOE, PP and IU compared

        2004         2008

PSOE  11,026,163   11,064,524
PP     9,763,144   10,169,973
IU     1,284,081      963,040


II.2  Social democracy, PP and IU compared

                           2004         2008

Social democratic (1)   11,026,163   11,368,059
PP                       9,763,144   10,169,973
IU                       1,284,081      963,040

(1) PSOE + UPyD


II.3  Left and Right compared

               2004         2008

Left (1)    12,310,244   12,361,129
Right(2)     9,763,144   10,169,973

(1) PSOE + UPyD + IU
(2) PP





III  BASQUE COUNTRY

III.1  Turnout

                   2004        2008

Electorate       1,803,937   1,738,910
Turnout (votes)  1,352,334   1,128,480
Turnout (%)         74,97%      64,90%


III.2  Main parties compared

                   2004           2008

PNV               420,980        303,426
PSE               339,751        425,567
PP                235,785        206,702
EA                 80,905         50,121        
EB                102,342         50,123
Aralar             38,560         29,784


III.3  Spanish state and 'Lizarra' compared

                   2004            2008

Spanish state (1) 575,536         632,269
Lizarra (2)       642,787         433,454

(1) PSE + PP
(2) PNV + EA + EB + Aralar





IV  CATALUNYA

IV.1  Turnout
                    2004          2008

Electorate        5,308,714     5,211,454
Turnout (votes)   4,032,589     3,710,166
Turnout              75.96%        71.19%


IV.2  Performance of the principal parties

                     2004         2008

PSC               1,586,748     1,672,777
CiU                 835,471       774,317
Ezquerra            638,902       289,927
PP                  626,107       604,964
ICV-EUIA            234,790       181,753
________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism