The failure of Spain's widely-predicted fascist resurgence

Spain's widely-predicted fascist resurgence failed to materialise, but the left are in a much weaker position than before.

On Monday morning Spain awoke to a widespread sense of relief that the horrific extreme-right Vox party will not be able to sneak its way into the national government as part of a right-wing coalition with the conservative Partido Popular, which was the widely anticipated outcome after the left-wing parties in government took an electoral hammering at the local elections just a few months ago.

In a huge reversal of fortunes the left significantly outperformed expectations to make an ultra-right wing PP/Vox coalition government a mathematical impossibility.

PP won the most votes and the most seats, but the widely-anticipated right/extreme-right coalition fell short of the required seats after the Vox vote fell by 650,000, losing them 19 of the 52 seats they won in 2019.

The combined vote of the main centre-left party PSOE and the hastily assembled left/green coalition Sumar also wasn’t enough to form a parliamentary majority, meaning there are two likely options.

Either PSOE and Sumar negotiate with a selection of parties from Spain’s autonomous regions to form a rainbow coalition with a small majority, which won’t be easy given several of these smaller parties are on the right, or Spain waits in limbo for yet another election, which would be likely to happen in early 2024.

There is very little public appetite for another election, and voting again would come with the risk of voter-fatigue, and a weakening of the anti-fascist fightback that prevented Vox from taking power this time. How many times can people be told that this election is so vitally important because of the risk of fascism, before the message begins to wear thin?

It’s inconceivable that PP and Vox could try to form a coalition with parties from autonomous regions like Catalonia and the Basque Country, even the right-wing ones, given that Vox have repeatedly stated that they would make these parties illegal, and implement a depraved policy of resurrecting Franco’s repression of languages like Catalan and Basque (a fight PP and Vox have already been waging against the Valencian language after forming the regional government in Valencia).

None of these autonomous regional parties are going to want to work with a bunch of Franco-worshipping fanatics who want to outlaw their political parties and prevent their people from speaking their own languages, and without Vox, PP would be even further from a majority, even if every single regional party supported them.

A grand coalition between first placed PP and second placed PSOE (akin to the Tories and Labour sharing power) is also extremely unlikely, given the vitriolic smear campaign the PP leader conducted against PSOE and their leader Pedro Sánchez during the election campaign.

Despite overall gains for the right, it’s clear that a lot of people in Spain are actually happy with the relatively free, socially liberal democracy they’ve become since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975. Spain was one of the first countries on earth to adopt gay equality; women’s rights get far more attention than in many other countries (although there’s still a lot of work to be done); Spain has dramatically toned down the deadly and illiberal “war on drugs”; Spain’s various other languages are no longer systematically repressed; and only a minority hanker for a return to the brutal tyranny of the Franco dictatorship.

Despite the relief that the frothing extreme-right, conspiracy-mongering Franquista resurrectionists won’t be able to enter government, this result leaves Spain in a state of uncertainty.

It’s likely that several of the parties from the autonomous regions would demand independence referendums and an end to the political persecution of independence activists in return for their support, but PSOE and Sumar wouldn’t be in any position to deliver, even if they wanted to, given that PP have taken a majority in the Spanish Senate, and would definitely torpedo any attempts to amend the post-Franco constitution to allow independence referendums for Catalonia or the Basque Country, or real freedom of political expression.

There’s also a deal of economic uncertainty too, over the Sánchez government’s excellent package of market interventions that have successfully reduced inflation to the lowest rate of all the major EU economies (below 2% in June).

Without a strong majority, and with the fiscally conservative right controlling the Senate, it’s going to be more difficult to maintain successful anti-inflation measures like free local public transport, price controls on staple foods, rent controls, subsidies, and direct interventions in the energy market to prevent the kind of egregious energy profiteering we’ve seen in the UK.

It remains to be seen whether Spain can weather the uncertainty, and maintain the effective market intervention policies that have staved off the high rates of inflation that the UK and many other European economies are still suffering.

But whatever the cost of this uncertainty, it’s still infinitely better than having a grotesque, misogynistic, homophobic, Spanish ultranationalist Franco tribute act getting their hands on the levers of power.