On the road toward Spain’s elections

THE GENERAL elections set for December 20 of this year no doubt carry special historical meaning, comparable to those which took place during the transition to democracy between 1977 and 1982. If the task placed before the parties of "consensus" at that time was to find a reformist path out of the dictatorship in order to consolidate a new regime, today, these parties are searching for a way out of a deep crisis (socio-economic, political and national-territorial) that the current regime is suffering, a crisis that has been placed squarely in the middle of this fall's debate and electoral challenge.

So once again, we are faced with reform or rupture--or more concretely, the re-foundation of Spanish politics and the opening of a process of constituent rupture(s), not only with the regime, but also with the economic and political order of the eurozone.

In reality, this process began with the neoliberal turn carried out by Spanish Socialist Workers Party President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2010, which was subsequently intensified by the conservative President Mariano Rajoy.

If we could not mount this sort of challenge in the late 1970s, today, we cannot escape it--that is, unless we accept our defeat is irreversible in the wake of the Greek experience. To do so would mean giving up on democracy and succumbing to the discourse that "there is no alternative" to this Europe--a Europe which, to be sure, has substituted the Berlin Wall of the Cold War for a long list anti-immigrant measures, of external and internal walls and fences in the name of "national preference."

More concretely, what is at stake immediately in these elections is whether or not the dominant bipartisan dynasty can survive. This is the Spanish version of the "extreme center" to which Tariq Ali referred when discussing the so-called Third Way propounded by Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher's most fervent disciple. This dynasty has, until now, guaranteed the political system's stability. The question is: Is this duopoly now entering into a definite decline, to be replaced by a multi-party system in which the new center-right Ciudidanos party ("Citizens" in Spanish) or Podemos can tip the balance in favor of either modest reformism or push toward an open rupture.

Furthermore, December's polls appear to be the end of an electoral cycle that began in May 2014 with elections to the European Union parliament, and then continued with the Andalusian elections in March, national municipal and autonomous regional elections in May, and the Catalan elections in September, all of this year.

In little more than an extraordinarily intense period of a year and a half, we have witnessed a dizzying array of developments. There was the eruption of Podemos in the European parliamentary elections that soon became a tsunami after the party's October 2014 founding national assembly in the Palacio de Vistalegre in Madrid. Soon after, Podemos rapidly lost steam, due as much to a media and institutional counteroffensive as to its own mistakes, especially the party "model" it adopted.

Then, Ciudadanos jumped in at the national level, combining a belligerent Spanish nationalism with an anti-corruption and centrist discourse, even if it had trouble disguising the fact that its fiscal policies were copied from the right-wing FAES think-tank and its social policies merely parroted the conservatives in calling to bar "illegal" immigrants' access to basic rights such as to health care.

Meanwhile, Popular Unity Candidates won a significant number of municipal elections in large and medium cities under the banner of "the people to the rescue," while launching audits of public debt, thereby gaining unprecedented access to City Halls.

Next, the PSOE managed to put the brakes on its own decline thanks to its electoral victories in Andalusia and its institutional power base, especially in the autonomous regional governments. And even Rajoy's conservatives have stabilized their support (notwithstanding front-page corruption scandals that have reached as high as ex-vice President Rodrigo Rato), owing to a certain sense of "macroeconomic recovery" for some sections of the middle classes--although this is despite growing social inequality, an unemployment rate that remains persistently above 20 percent and an increasing number of precarious and impoverished workers.

Finally, there is a tendency toward open confrontation between, on the one side, the Catalan pro-sovereignty, pro-independence movement and, on the other, a regime--including Ciudidanos--which continues to refuse to recognize Catalonia's right to decide on its own future. The regime does not even bother to offer an alternative, except for appealing to the Constitutional Courts (which only serve to safeguard the "Immaculate Constitution") or an ambiguous promise to search for a far off future which will somehow "stitch Catalonia to Spain."

The most important feature in the current moment, whether or not one wishes to recognize it, is the open fracture in the Catalan-Spanish conflict.

If it is not possible to argue that the September 27 election represents clear support for independence, as those forces that support independence claim, then it is at least clear that the absolute majority those forces enjoy in the new Catalan parliament is sufficient to keep the issue alive and to open a deep crack in the regime.

All the more so when keeping in mind that this majority includes the Popular Unity Candidacy, which tripled its vote to 8.2 percent and took 10 seats in the Catalan parliament. The CUP is an anti-capitalist force which does not hide its desire to push for a Catalan Republic, one whose social program is based on breaking with the Troika's austerity policies. Indeed, this sort of program is exactly what is necessary to attract the majority of the popular sectors in Catalan society who remain skeptical of independence.

The Podemos leadership has long resisted revising its Spanish "national-popular" project in order to be able to address the specificity of the Catalan national question and, therefore, the existence of a Catalan demos who aspire to be recognized as a sovereign political subject, one which is not subaltern to the Spanish demos.

This failure is now producing disastrous consequences. In fact, the meager results achieved by Podemos in Catalonia on September 27 cannot be solely attributed to the agreement it reached between itself and the leaders of the Initiative for Catalonia. This coalition included the Greens and the United and Alternative Left party, all running under the "Catalonia, Yes We Can" banner, winning 8.9 percent of the total vote. Incidentally, this pact contradicts the Podemos leadership's consistent opposition to calls for "unity of the left" and against what it calls the left's "alphabet soup."

Nor can the September 27 vote be explained by the lack of name recognition of the candidate heading its electoral list. Instead, above everything else, Podemos' failure flowed from wanting to turn the Catalan elections into the first round of December's general elections, an intention that was corroborated by the actions of the campaign's main leaders.

This last decision led them to maintain a Spain-centered discourse that, despite vaguely recognizing the Catalan people's "right to decide," only served to provide ammunition for its opponents' attacks, allowing them to include Podemos in the "no to independence" bloc, thereby paving the way for potential Podemos supporters voting for other formations.

Moreover, by counterposing their discourse (necessary as it was) in defense of social rights and against corruption and cutbacks linked to liberal Catalan president Artur Mas on the one hand, to the debate about independence on the other, in order to ask that this question be postponed until Podemos' hoped-for victory in December, Podemos' leaders left out clear support for independence, even as the program of the "Catalonia, Yes We Can" coalition itself (of which they were a part) defended it.

Even if December's results cannot be extrapolated from September 27, the setback suffered by Podemos in Catalonia is already affecting its standing as an alternative. Meanwhile, in contrast, Ciudadanos' success is reinforcing its role as a "spare part," or at least a crutch, for the declining Popular Party--whose own weakness is only accentuated by Rajoy's leadership, including among the party's "barons," with ex-President José María Aznar at the head of an internal opposition.

Thus, we find ourselves confronted with a panorama that, it we keep recent polls in mind, makes only two conclusions clear: First, no party is going to win an absolute majority, and second, a large part of the electorate remains volatile and undecided. This raises, therefore, various possible scenarios for pacts and alliances in order to assure "governability" in the new stage to come, while a phase of "non-governability," which might require the calling of new elections, cannot be ruled out.

This all comes in a context in which, as has been recently proven, the Troika will continue to demand strict compliance with the Fiscal Pact, new cuts in social spending--the European Commission just reported that 10 billion euros will have to be cut from the budget in 2016--and a permanent reduction in wages.

Reasons enough come January, no matter what happens, for us to push forward, as is already being done on the local and autonomous regional levels, with building new institutions emerging from a symbiosis between our own activity and that of our "representatives" based on self-organization and popular empowerment.

Today, taking all this into account, the Podemos "victory" hypothesis seems improbable. Podemos co-founder Carolina Bescansa recently recognized this reality, which is especially clear now that Izquierda Unida (United Left, a coalition headed by the relatively small Spanish Communist Party) has recovered a sense of being able to fight for votes on the left. This competition makes it unlikely that the Podemos leadership can recover the illusion, principally advocated by Pablo Iglesias, that only it can deliver "change."

The "electoral war machinery," designed specifically for this project, has shown its enormous limitations, both externally (underestimating the necessity of supporting a new wave of change from the municipal Popular Unity Candidacies in order to build greater unity, a failure whose reasons will have to be discussed at a later date) and internally (using old methods for creating policies that, as we have seen, led to the steady decline in participation, both online and in the loss of many activists from Podemos' local organizing circles).

On top of all this, there is a growing ambiguity in the discourse of Podemos, on questions large and small, that carries a ring of "political realism" (for example, with respect to what took place in Greece) in the name of a poorly understood "universality." Not to mention how this posture continues ignoring the need for clearly feminist and environmental points in its program and in its proposals, or how it leads to hesitancy for reclaiming "historical memory"--a precondition not only for truth, justice and the righting of past wrongs, but also for socializing new generations in a truly democratic culture.

Unfortunately, the context of social demobilization in which we find ourselves--with the partial exceptions of recent struggles such as those led by the workers at Coca-Cola and Vodafone, and also the efforts of the EuroMarch campaign for social and economic justice--cannot be expected to produce the best possible climate for the political project we need.

Even so, there are still two months to go before the elections, and it would be a mistake to resign ourselves to the risk of Podemos becoming a third or fourth force in a new Spanish parliament, only to find itself pressured (in the name of "governmental responsibility") into governing alongside the PSOE, whose reformist promises would quickly be forgotten.

While we wait to find out the specifics of Podemos' final electoral program (even if it was developed without the genuine collective deliberation necessary for democratic clarification and was only discussed in a fragmented manner, by various sectional groups), we trust that a clear readiness to break with austerity counts for more than the doubts and weaknesses shown until now. Podemos must confirm its willingness to lead such a rupture if it does not want to disappoint the many hopes placed in it since its birth on January 17, 2014.

All in all, whatever the outcome of the elections, the "war of position" will not end in December. It will be merely the end of battle of one cycle, which will then begin another in which it we must resume the task of building a "movement party" at the service of a "popular unity" that is needed more than ever if we want to keep hopes for "change" open in defiance of the bipartisan "restoration" project already under way.