The popularity of Vox contributed to Pedro Sánchez’s election win, but so did the decline of Unidas Podemos
​From the Guardian, 29 April 2019

Pedro Sánchez is the clear winner of Sunday’s snap elections in Spain. With the highest turnout since 1996, the prime minister’s Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) won nearly double the number of seats of its closest competitor, the conservative Popular Party (PP). But in the country’s highly fragmented political system, it is unlikely to govern alone. Instead, Sánchez must look for support from other parties. Like many progressive parties in Europe, he will have to choose between a technocratic party looking to centralise power and a radical-left party that favours decentralisation.

Sánchez’s victory is the result of two main trends. First and foremost is the rise of Vox, a new, openly misogynistic and xenophobic party that toys with nostalgia for Franco’s dictatorship. Backed by the likes of Steve Bannon, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini, and indirectly financed (via the Madrid-based CitizenGo organisation) by a US super PAC with ties to Donald Trump, Russian oligarch Aleksei Komov and the Italian MP Luca Volontè, who is accused of bribery, Vox rode a wave of anti-Catalan sentiment into the government of Andalucía in December. Sunday’s massive turnout (75.8%) was most likely driven by widespread fear of a rightwing coalition government that would include it
The second trend that explains Sánchez’s staggering victory is the decline of Unidas Podemos, the radical-left party that emerged in the wake of the anti-austerity indignados movement. Though the party initially promised to implement a progressively participatory new style of politics, over time its leadership has adopted a more traditional top-down approach that has been overly reliant on individual personalities. It lacked proper channels for democratic deliberation, so internal dissent most often took the form of high-profile desertions, such as that of former party leader Íñigo Errejón. It was also recently revealed that a group of police officers have been accused of conducting a smear campaign against the party, with help from government officials. Much was made, too, about the purchase of a pricey chalet by party leaders Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero, which was depicted in the media as a betrayal of the couple’s leftist ideals.

Together, these factors created a climate of disenchantment around the party that drove almost half of its voters to the socialists or other parties, if not abstention. This is particularly damaging in a country where, historically, a crucial part of the electorate votes for either sweeping change or nothing at all. After 40 years of military rule, Spain’s representative democracy was not designed to reward parties that rely on such a critical mass of voters. But this doesn’t make them any less decisive.

In Podemos’s early days, as its leaders publicly debated what the party’s structure should be, Pablo Iglesias famously responded to one unconventional proposal by saying that then-president Mariano Rajoy could not be defeated by three party leaders, but by one. The party’s spectacular results in the 2015 elections seemed to confirm this view. But Sunday’s outcome suggests that the party might benefit from a more radical approach that gives greater prominence to its social bases and shares the burden of leadership.

If Podemos hopes to win back the voters it has just lost, it will have to distinguish itself from the traditional parties. A radical approach to participation would do much to legitimise its links with social movements and revive its roots in the indignados uprising. After all, the indignados forged a broad consensus by framing the financial crisis and EU-imposed austerity as anti-democratic and demanding a radical democratisation of the economy and the whole of society.
Towards this end, Podemos could take some cues from the leftwing councils currently governing most of Spain’s major cities, including Madrid and Barcelona. Though not without significant shortcomings, these councils have made citizen participation a crucial part of their brand by organising citizen consultations and participatory budgets. On the other hand, a more radical approach to participation would involve opening the party up to more meaningful forms of deliberation and participation. Over recent years, Podemos’s failure to do so has come off as a disavowal of its initial promise. This is most disheartening because it leaves the impression that a new approach to politics simply isn’t possible. And when the new seems impossible, people are tempted to go back to the old ways or, worse, to embrace the destructive, authoritarian political nihilism of the far right.

In one month, Spain will once again head to the polls to vote for its local governments and the European parliament. In the meantime, Pedro Sánchez’s socialist party will likely enjoy something of a honeymoon period. Outside the party’s headquarters on Sunday, an ecstatic crowd chanted slogans such as No pasarán (“They shall not pass”) and Sí se puede (“Yes we can”), both of which were previously associated with Podemos, the indignados and the anti-fascist resistance before them. Rather than confronting the socialists with inflammatory discourse, Podemos would be wise to remind progressives in Spain, Europe and beyond that another world is possible by putting it into practice.

• Carlos Delclós is a sociologist and associate researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB). His views do not necessarily reflect those of CIDOB

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​On the 12th April 2019, Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s current Prime Minister and leader of the centre-left Socialist party (PSOE), started off the campaign trail. The next two weeks would be full on, with full face election banners in the streets hanging from lampposts, and billboards with ministerial candidates being depicted as action heroes walking from an explosion. TV debates, old ghosts of politicians past returning to give their cents worth and a new character to make everyone in Europe interested in Spanish politics again. The return of the populist far right.
Pedro Sanchez, nicknamed the handsome one “El Guapo”, called a General Election on the 22nd March 2019 following a budget defeat in parliament. Only 9 months before a motion of no confidence been passed in the government center right Popular Party (Partido Popular PP) the party who gained the most votes of the elections in 2016 .

Spain has 52 constituencies, one for each province which is 50 including the islands, and the extra two are for the north African enclave cities Ceuta and Melilla. 350 deputies are elected to the lower house of congress where they sit in a semicircle. The upper house, the senate, is also elected on the same day, but their role is minor in the grand scheme of things. The Spain’s parliament is a large grey cubed looking building, with rich and traditional interior. The towering golden doors at the front of the parliament are not used often and are guarded by two large stone lions which are overlooking tourists having their photo taken. Spain’s democracy operates on a version of proportional representation to allocate seats, they allocate each province a number of seats depending on the province size and population, for example Madrid gets 32 seats whilst most other provinces without large cities get four or five seats. They count the number of votes in each province and split them between the parties, people vote for a party not a person. The party has a ‘closed list’ which means they list who will get the first seat in that province, the public don’t see this. the votes they have the more seats they fill from the list. So if you are friends with your leader, who chooses the list, then you are almost guaranteed a seat. The Salamanca district in Madrid has the highest number of votes for the PP in the country, so being in the top 3 of the list for the PP in Madrid guarantees you a seat, which is why most leaders are sitting in Madrid. When the seats have been allocated they revert to a first-past-the-post system, typical in the UK, where the party, or coalition of parties, that have the most seats can ask the king to form a government. There are many regional parties in Spain that stand to represent their own region’s interests, often these parties are independent based.

To form a majority government, a party must have over 176 deputies to form a majority government, which has been almost impossible in Spain in recent years. This will be Spain’s third election in four years. In 2015 the parties could not form a government after the election and elections had to be held again in 2016. This was mainly down to the fact that new parties had emerged, in the end the PP formed a minority government as PSOE abstained from voting, also ejecting their leader at the time, Pedro Sánchez, as he was at odds with the hierarchy of the party. Later he was reelected against a favourite of the party, and a more centrist candidate Susana Diaz. The PP were ruling in as a minority with help from the centrist party Cuidudanos (C’s), a new newcomer from Catalonia in the 2015 election. They are the biggest party, but not the ruling party, in the Catalan parliament. When they started, they positioned themselves as a centre-left party but seem to have been influenced by Spain’s sway to the right in recent years.
The PP were thrown out of power because of an ongoing corruption case that saw then PM Marion Rajoy in court giving evidence. The PSOE along with newish far left party Podemos and smaller independence parties from the Basque country and Catalonia voted out Rajoy with the vote of no confidence and made Pedro Sanchez PM with a minority of 84 seats. Following 9 months of trying to increase minimum wage and make other laws to improve the society that has suffered the EU’s austerity plans and economic bad luck, the PSOE had to call elections. The same people that supported the formation of a minority left-wing coalition government, the independent Catalan parties, refused to support the 2019 economic budget due to the breakdown in talks regarding Catalonia’s independence. The Catalans voted with the right wing parties to ensure the budget could not make it through government. With in minutes PSOE’s Facebook page lit up with a picture of the parties voting against minimum wage increases and other things in the budget. The blame game had started.

From this point on till the beginning of the campaign trail there was a pre-election manoeuvring. This election is one that is framed as left verses right. The old two-party system of Spain as a whole is dead, and it is definitely a time of uncertainty for many people. Even up till recently, days before the elections, up to 40% of the country is still said to be unsure how they will vote. Most of these people are women and young people. The divisions in the country are more clear than ever when you see the wide range of parties and the level of support they have.

We Can?
Many had counted Podemos, out the game as they had been quiet, and the only news to come out of the party was that of splits and divisions. Íñigo Errejón, one of the original founders who looks like a toddler and is said to be the brains behind the policies of Podemos, said that he would stand on a platform with current Madrid Mayor Manuela Carmena in the up and coming local elections in May. They have formed a new political group Mas Madrid. He never formally left Podemos, but this seems to be out of kindness not to cause trouble more than anything else.
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On Saturday 23rd of March the pony-tailed professor and leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, returned to politics after his paternity leave which he had been on to look after his twins since December. In the meantime Podemos spokesperson, and his partner, Irene Montero had been fronting Podemos. Even before his comeback the poster of his return event had been slated in the media for being overly macho. It was a picture of Iglesias from behind holding his fist in the air with the word “Vuelve” or return, the “El” was emphasised which in Spanish is masculine. All parties, even those with poor feminist credentials, criticised him and Podemos eventually removed the poster with an apology but it was too late it had been retweeted to high heaven. This is an example of how the media treat Podemos, they jump on anything. After the successful and charismatic return to the Plaza de Renia Sofia, Podemos’s old celebration square after they won seats in the 2015 EU elections, Iglesias went on Spain’s more liberal channel La Sexta, he let fire at the media and the banks. He talked passionately about how the media was run by the elites that don’t want the people to have power, and how the banks were running the country and not the government, the Podemos social media machine was on fire tweeting and sharing quotes from his first interview. Many feel this was a return to the old style, and it is easy to see that Podemos, despite what the media say, still have their solid fan base. But will it be enough? Many regular left-wing voters felt let down by Podemos as when they started 5 years before, they were meant to be something different. Yet, setting such hard lines for a coalition in the 2016 elections made it possible, some claim, for the PP to form a minority government. Podemos have also faced a scandal that rocked their world and left the leaders name is in tatters.

The mansion scandal was big news in Spain and left many Podemos voters feeling disheartened and upset with its leader. Iglesias brought a chalet in a well off town in the mountains of Madrid. A great deal of people felt he had become “one of them”, one of the very people he had been criticising just a year before and saying he would never leave his neighbourhood, now two of Podemos’s top deputies had bought a house and this was in the middle of a media frenzy for weeks. It was on all the talk shows and in the papers, even bloggers were writing about it. These sorts of events damage party’s reputation that does not go away for a while, and maybe that is the problem, Iglesias went nowhere until his children were born.
On the buildup to the election campaign weeks Iglesias was in court with the PP. The PP are being investigated for using their time in government, whilst Iglesias was an MEP, to spy on other political opponents, one can imagine they feared new parties and they misused their positions of influence to get the Spanish state to read Iglesias text messages and made attempts to discredit Podemos, this has been nicknamed Spain’s Watergate. Obviously this just reinforces the PP’s corruption record.

However, in the last two weeks of campaigning Podemos has won back support. The first week was over the Easter break, many parties just flooded every town and city in Spain with terrible posters and banners. Many towns put up extra boards on the street for political parties to put up their posters on, yet the country is so divided that the posters only last a day or two before they are ripped down again. PSOE’s posters of Pedro Sánchez big face filling the paper has reminded some people of Big Brother from1984 or the Hunger games election scenes. Podemos has not played a part in the traditional Spanish campaigning of putting the leader’s face on a banner, hanging from every lamppost in the street, smiling with photoshopped white teeth and a terrible slogan. Podemos have opted for a slogan saying that “you write the history you want” with a purple heart. They have also highlighted their manifesto promises more than other parties. They promised to raise minimum wage to 1200 euros, have a referendum on bull fighting, improve animal welfare, create a national bank, cut energy emission, create a national energy company and invest in green energy. They have also said they want to democratise the government and reform the senate, justice system and how political parties are run, along with reshaping the media and curbing private companies influence on the government. They have also made clear promises like free university education, yet with over 200 promises it seems overly ambitious. Maybe that is what they need though.

Regarding Iglesias, he is a different person when compared to the previous campaigns, no longer spitting insults at opponents but taking a step back and just putting a message across of his parties election promises, you might even think he had been watching the manner of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Some have said that becoming a father has pacified him. This was clear in the televised debates during the second week of campaigning. He allowed the leaders of the other parties to slander each other whilst he addressed issues of social inequality and lowering standards of living and let the other 3 battle it out over Catalonia. Hopefully Podemos, and Pablo have won back some support. Unfortunately, throughout most of April, most polls on average have been suggesting that Podemos will lose up to half of their seats, from 69 seats they have now down to around 30 seats. Polls in Spain have never been safe bets, but there appears to be several narratives around Madrid and other parts of the country that hit similar tones. Many people are considering tactical voting as they fear Vox getting into power. Many Podemos voters flocking to POSE as people see them as a safer bet to get more seats, some may have returned after Pablo’s performance at the debates.

Big Brother of the Left

The tone of the campaigns really shows the parties true colours. Podemos have had a message of hope and change; trying to position themselves as a credible left-wing alternative to PSOE, whilst remaining very aware that should they win big, they will no doubt need to work with PSOE to govern Spain. PSOE have been acting as if the election is in the bag for them. Calling an election when he did, Pedro Sanchez has tried to capitalise on the rise of the far right and hopes to split the right vote, and use the fear of Vox to get people to vote for a sensible government in the form of PSOE. The slogan “The Spain you want” gives the image of it’s us, or have this new regressive far right party in power with the centre right Ciudadanos and right wingers the PP. Hopefully PSOE, and Pedro Sanchez’s arrogance doesn’t put off too many voters and their bets pay off.

PSOE have lost a lot of voters confidence because of their history of corruption, and their vanilla pro business version of social democracy. Many feel, myself included, that Pedro Sanchez could be a reasonably good leader and an average social democrat if he was allowed to be, yet the right wingers of the party machine seem to have other ideas and may even consider a coalition government with C’s rather than Podemos. PSOE’s manifesto is very ambiguous and full of glib sentences the sort you may find in a holiday brochure. Looking further at their promises for Spain, 110 things they want to do, you can see that they have their hearts are in the right place. They are not at radical as Podemos but promise to look at free childcare for children under 3, repeal all union laws made by the PP, improve the welfare system, simplify the work contracts and invest in more green friendlily business. They also promise to raise taxes for large corporations and high earners and explore Catalonia’s self-governing rights to see if it can come to some agreement on the ongoing issue of the region. They want a return to the normal which does not exist at the moment.

Enter Right
The television debates were the highlight of what turned out to be an uneventful election campaign. In the run up to the election debates there were arguments about who should be allowed on the TV debates. Vox are becoming a big force in Spanish politics at the moment despite not having any deputies in the congress. Pedro Sanchez wanted them on the debates but the electoral commission denied this as they never had over 5% of the public’s vote at the last election. The debates were eventually reorganised after a small amount of drama probably created more by the media than the politicians. The debates were on the Monday and Tuesday nights of the second week of campaigning.


he interesting bromance here was between Pablo Casado, the right wing leader of the PP and Alberto Rivera the leader of C’s. On the Monday night they got on, and on the Tuesday they were nearly strangling each other. Pablo Casado took over from previous Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. He is much younger than Rajoy and is more right wing, inexperienced and sharper with his tongue. Only days before the debates in Toledo he has been blaming the PSOE for starting the civil war and colluding with independentist parties. PP have lost a lot of ground in recent months, mainly down to corruption and the emergence of slick centre right party C’s, and for those that like their politics very right, Vox. The PP have played this election by trying to say that they are the safe bet of the right. “Value security” is their election motto, and it does not seem to work. The PP were one of the two traditional parties in Spain, alongside the PSOE, but years of corruption, politicians lying and being involved in scandal after scandal has put voters off this traditional right wing party.

Casado is trying to reestablish them as the right wing party of Spain but C’s and Vox seem to have sucked the lifeblood from them. They will have to rely on their rural vote, where the old parties have always done so well, and some of the more skeptical right wing voters in the traditional cities like Madrid, but the PP don’t seem to have any wind in their sails this election. They could even lose their rural vote. A mix of traditional campaign techniques of conservatives parties trying to appeal to people’s sense of tradition and a promise of security from progress, even having bull fighters stand as deputies, doesn’t seem to work or help. Their pledges for the country are standard conservative policies such as freeing up the labour market, cut taxes for specific groups and areas such as tourism, and they also want to apply article 155 to Catalonia to suspend regional governance. The PP have announced no striking policies and have been trying to secure their rural and upper class city vote in a bid, not to win the election, but stop their party falling apart.

Enter Centre Right
The other half of the bromance, Alberto Rivera from Cuidudanos has been busy not saying a lot, whilst being quite loud. On the first night of the debate Pablo Casado and Rivera joined forces to attack Pedro Sanchez mainly over Catalonia and his poor management as Prime minister. They were bringing out many objects including graphs and cards, it was like a magic show. Rivera brought out a picture of Sanchez trying to bump fists with the president of Catalonia. Pablo Iglesias even had a copy of the constitution which, ironically for the anti religion left winger, looked like a prayer book. Twitter was a flood of comparisons to priests and bedtime stories being told by the Podemos front man. There was no obvious winner of this debate but many say the Rivera came across better and had the upper hand due to the Catalonia debate.

The second night of debates had a clear winner, Pablo Iglesias and was a complete surprise for Pedro Sánchez who looked ready for another beating from the two right wingers. To his amusement Casado and Rivera attacked each other and the left wingers just looked on baffled. Rivera changed tack, maybe he realised too late that they could be fighting for the Prime minister position should they get enough votes and have to form a coalition. Whilst the fighting went on Iglesias kept his calm and delivered his party’s manifesto promises, many saw a new side to the militant activist of the past.

The debate was the same day as St George’s day, in Catalonia it is the tradition to swap books with other people. Rivera gave Sanchez a copy of his own thesis. This is trying to highlight the previous scandal that Sanchez may have not written his own doctoral thesis, and Sanchez, prepared as ever, pulled out a copy of Santiago Abascal, Vox’s leader, autobiography and said something to the effect of, if this is who you are getting into bed with, you should know more about them.
Ciudadanos are an interesting but shallow party. They paint themselves as modern liberals of the country; they want to modernise and improve Spain whilst keeping it together. They want to cut taxes across the board and cut taxes by 60% for people that live in depopulated areas. They also want to reform the tax system for smaller companies and make it easier to become self-employed. They take a hard stance against Catalonia self governance and want to also eliminate royal decrees which have been abused by previous governments to make laws whilst avoiding the debate and vote in congress. PP members, and even politicians, are defecting to C’s. Ciudadanos appear to be replacing themselves in the old position of the PP. A pro-business, low tax choice for people who have center, or right wing inclined politics. Yet, this image has been tarnished somewhat by their alliances and public appearances with the PP and more so Vox. Initially they agreed to govern Andalucia with Vox and the PP following the regional elections, which showed they were not above getting into bed with Vox to gain power. Later, they were also seen at a right wing rally in Madrid’s Colon Square in February 2019.
This was a protest organised by the three right leaning parties and all three leaders where there. They protested that fact that Pedro Sánchez had planned to have further talks with Catalan parties regarding independence, however they Catalan parties refused to rule out not having a referendum which Sanchez was not willing to give, therefore on the Friday he called off the talks. Despite this, the right wing group went ahead with their protest, on the Sunday, saying they wanted to vote on the future of Spain. Many people in Spain felt put out by the change in government they never got to vote for, due to the motion of no confidence, and they wanted to vote again. Newspapers the next day showed 40,000 Spaniards in Colon Square protesting for a united Spain and against the PSOE government. The papers never showed pictures of the crowds but of all 3 leaders stood in a line, shoulder to shoulder, despite Cuidudanos and PPs best attempts to get out of the picture. Following the demonstration, a picture was doing the rounds on twitter of the 3 right wing leaders stood in a line next to a drinks fridge which contained the body of Franco. C’s were being welcomed to the right wether they liked it or not. It’s also funny how people change their mind on voting. I spoke to one voter who worked for the police, and would normally vote PP, who planned to vote for C’s as he felt Vox were too far right. Another first time voter told me she considered voting for C’s but was put off by their propaganda that was sent the week leading up to the vote, it was in plastic wrapping. Many even feel that with the recent rise public disapproval of the maltreatment of animals, Spain may see its first anti bull-fighting party deputies from PACMA.

The party, which I have spoke at length about before, that is on everyone’s lips, left and right, is Vox. The far right party are the new National Front of Spain. Many people won’t admit to voting for Vox in public, but many will. They are predicted to get up to 10% of the vote, but I think they will get even more. Following their shock win in socialist controlled Andalusia, Vox have grown from strength to strength and this is mainly happening online. Their leader Santiago Abascal has been painting himself as the strongman of Spain. He has been saying anything to get a reaction, and it has been working, but hopefully against him.

How Far Right?
Initially he started off by saying he would build a wall in Spain’s African colonies to stop people from reaching there, although there is already a huge fence there. He then announced that he would relax gun laws in Spain to allow Spaniards to protect themselves, this came the day after the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand when 50 people were shot dead by a white supremacist, and New Zealand tightened its gun laws. Abascal has also been critical of the government, and other parties, management and lack of respect for rural Spain which has become the most sparsely populated area in Europe, he has a point, they have been neglected and he is taking full advantage of this. He released videos of himself on twitter riding a house with a famous bullfighter in the dusty plains of Spain. He promotes a strong man image, often wearing military type shirts, and is very critical of feminism and independence movements. Their main message as a party is to centralise all government powers in Spain to Madrid and ban all parties that challenge a united Spain. He also wants to stop most immigration to the country and deport any illegal immigrants that are all ready here. Vox position themselves as a strongly catholic party that will stop funding feminism and trans-gender causes and ban public hospitals from carrying out abortions and gender reassignment operations.


On their website it says they stand against political correctness and want the media, and other political parties, to stop imposing political correctness on them and stop telling them how to feel, they have even hinted at banning media channels they don’t agree with. Vox have also promised cuts to public spending, want to merge all local governments and cut the corporation tax rate to 12.5% to attract businesses to Spain. Territorially, they want to increase pressure to claim Gibraltar back and suspend all region’s, including Catalonia, autonomy. As their slogan says they want to put Spain first.

Previous comparisons with UKIP and Trump are rife in the media, but Vox has a different feeling to it, they are not hardcore euro sceptics that have emerged in other European countries; they are critical of their own country’s system and identity, something that has been in-flux since the transition to democracy over 40 years ago. Franco effectively created the Spanish stereotype of flamenco dancing, sangria drinking Spaniards to bring in tourists.

Vox are a far right part and many say that we should not call them this, or fascists. they may not be the fascists we have an image of marching around saluting but they have strong elements of fascism, more than most care to admit. Ethno-nationalism, heavy criticism of national democratic institutions and the image of a strong man leading a mass movement against others that are different to the country’s natives and threaten its existence. They have found a new way to power via democracy and they are a threat to it if they ever get control of the wheel.

Obviously this election does not compare to the war in terms of violence or threat level as we live in a better more democratic world but the situation is similar, as I said before it is left vs right more than ever with 2 left parties and 3 right parties, not forgetting the regional parties, the last time the political was this split in Spain was just before the war. The second republic, established a year after the fall of the first dictator of Spain, Miguel Primo de Rivera, was met with a lot of problems that the previous dictator never addressed, and it tried to reform the country over the next 8 years. These problems included poverty, unequal distribution of land and wealth and poor facilities for the public. They achieved a great deal improving the education and health of the country, yet Spain remained hugely divided. The conservative catholic upper and middle classes of the cities, and the deeply religious rural communities, feared the rise of the socialists, anarchists and communists that had won the second set of elections in the republic. They feared their land and riches would be given away and that they would separate the church from the state, a sense of the world changing scared much of traditional Spain.

Spain has progressed tenfold in recent years in the face of corrupt politicians and a macho culture that still embraces, and sees as part of its identity, the catholic traditions of years gone by. They have progressed on women’s rights and a general attitude towards sexism both at home and in the workplace. They have also fully embraced the LGBT culture in the big cities. Many Spanish people have also travelled and moved abroad because of the finical crisis, they have seen that things can be done differently and that Spain doesn’t have to be “different”. This has led to many traditionalists feeling put out and even threatened by progress and they blame it on several things, feminists unfairly take a lot of criticism along with the other regions of Spain.

Other regions in Spain, who have a strong regional identities, namely the Catalans and the Basques, have maintained a good standard of living in the face of austerity and international change when compared with the poorer areas in Spain. They made sacrifices the same as the rest of Spain, but they have been seen by the rest of Spain, more Catalonia than the Basque country, to be better off. In the Constitution they have more right to self government and this has led to an unspoken jealousy from some other regions, it’s like a jealousy between friend when someone is “doing well for themselves”, and it is very strong here in Madrid. There has also always been a stereotype that Catalans feel different, or some say better, than the rest of Spain. When the independence question was revitalised and got more attention from 2016 onwards, nationalism rose like the Spanish sun. The sale of red and yellow wrist bands mush have shot through the roof, and the hanging of Spanish flags from balconies became the norm. The traditionalist conservative Spain was unlike the rest of Europe, they were not only scared of immigration from the middle east and Africa, they were, but also threatened by desertion by their fellow country men and being left behind in the culture war. They were challenging what it meant to be Spanish in a time when no one really knew what it mean to be Spanish. This was all on the back of austerity that had gone on for over 10 years in Spain and had been imposed by the EU. Austerity, falling living standards, inequality and a changing culture are a bad mix with people whom differ from you, and you have been told are being treated better than you. The loss of national identity in times of hardship and change is nothing to ignore. Vox exploited this and was  pitting Spain against its own independent regions and immigrants alike.

Could the people who have been forgotten make all the difference? 
As I have mentioned before women could change the course of this election with their vote. However, there is also another element in play that many have forgotten about. Spain has an aging population where only a few people are propping up the traditional villages in Spain. Many of the young move away to study or for work, now these villages are left with next to nothing. Some villages have a doctor, butcher, fruit and vegetable seller visit once a week and the only thing often left standing in these towns is the local no-frills bar and most don’t even have a pharmacy anymore. The main parties have neglected the Internet and local amenities and these groups of people feel like they have been left behind, this was proven in the Andalusian elections where many traditional PSOE voters didn’t even bother to vote due to feeling despondent. Some villages have less than 25 people in them, one village that only has two old age pensioners in it was recently the star of a television advert for a car. People are aware of the dying rural Spain but the politicians have woken up too late to this. The people in the rural communities still vote for one of the two big parties, PSOE or PP, but many feel neglected by them and this is where Vox have been trying to pick up votes. There are fewer people that live in these provinces and a party needs less votes to get a seat, so electorally this was a safe bet for the old parties and Vox have been targeting these seats, a bet that may well pay off.

The campaigns finished on Friday the 26th and this will give Spain their traditional day of reflection, 24 hours before elections there is a canvassing blackout in the national media to give citizens a break before they make their decision on the Sunday. It feels as if the current narrative is lets get Pedro Sanchez out at any cost by the right, and from the left it is a vote for PSOE to keep the far right out. I think this quote from Felipe González, Socialist Prime Minister for the late 80s and early 90s sums up how I feel “do we really have to be content with a choice between a Frankenstein government and a Francostein one?”. 

With Spain’s soft left struggling inside the centrist party that is PSOE, and the rest of the left fighting for a breath in the shell that was Podemos, the left need to change this country whether they win or lose. If PSOE and Podemos pull off a coalition government, then they must change the country for the better from inside the government and inside the communities as its neighbour on the peninsula has. If they can do this, then they can fight back the right with good policies and by improving people’s lives. Yet, if PSOE agree a centrist pact with Cuidudanos, which could happen despite both ruling it out. One thing we can almost be sure of, and that is normally forgotten about, is that the regional parties often help make up governments, this could save the left and at the same time make life difficult. Many are praying they don’t have to rely on the Catalan parties as they will have demands that Pedro Sanchez could have a hard time meeting as PM. Then if things still don’t change then, in my view, there are two ways the country could go.

The way of France, people pushed to the point of poverty with poor services and being taxed more than they can afford. Then the people will revolt against the system and any party in power will have a tough time, or the more likely, and possibly worse route for the country, is that Vox will become a major right wing party alongside Cuidudanos. If this was to happen, then PP and PSOE would become a ghost of them former selves as losing this election, or not being able to form a government, will be a deadly blow for PSOE. No matter what happens to Vox, they are on the up and nothing seems to be stopping them. I hope I am wrong.

Edward Lawrence

This article will appear in my forthcoming book: Spain, Capitalism and English Teaching



References
https://www.voxespana.es/espana/que-es-vox
https://www.thelocal.es/20190412/explainer-what-you-need-to-know-about-spains-election
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-22/political-promises-manifesto-pledges-of-spain-s-main-parties
https://www.psoe.es/programa-electoral/
https://www.pp.es/conocenos/programas
https://www.ciudadanos-cs.org/programa-electoral
https://podemos.info/programa/
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/spain-s-watergate-erupts-ahead-of-election-1.3858659

Fighter against fascism in Spain, France and Germany


www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/19/neus-catala-obituary

Neus Català, who has died aged 103, was a lifelong fighter against fascism. A communist who had escaped over the Pyrenees at the end of the Spanish civil war, then joined the French resistance, she was eventually captured and sent to Ravensbrück, the Nazi death camp for women in northern Germany. She was then moved to the Flossenbürg camp, where she was set to work in the Holleschein munitions factory. Català was one of a group of women who sabotaged the bombs and shells being manufactured, by spitting in gunpowder or spilling oil in the machinery.

Her memories of the extermination camp, she said, were always in black and white, never in colour. She survived because of her determination and because “there was great solidarity among the women”. Català was critically ill when the camp was liberated in April 1945 (“We were just skulls with eyes”), but she recovered to continue her fight against fascism.

​isgusted that the allies had not overthrown Franco, in the postwar years she lived at Sarcelles, near Paris. She acted as a messenger for the Communist party’s underground work within Spain.

In the 1950s, disturbed at how the victims of fascism were too easily forgotten, she travelled all over France to find camp survivors. She compiled a list of the Spanish women in the camps. This led, in 1984, to the publication of Català’s book De la Resistencia y la Deportación: 50 Testimonios de Mujeres Españolas (Resistance and Deportation: 50 Testimonies of Spanish Women), which forced the question of historical justice into the public arena in Spain.

The daughter of Rosa Pallejà and Baltasar Català, Neus was born into a free-thinking family of small farmers in Els Guiamets, a village in the Priorat, southern Catalonia’s wine-producing and olive-growing country. By the age of 14, she was working in the fields: her first struggle was to demand equal pay for women in the grape harvest.

Neus joined the Communist Youth in the 1930s and remained a card-carrying communist all her life. In 1936, on the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, she moved to Barcelona, where she qualified as a nurse. By January 1939, when Barcelona fell to Franco’s troops, she was in charge of Les Acàcies orphanage at Premià, just north of Barcelona. In an odyssey through snow and bombs, she accompanied 180 orphans, mostly children of war victims, over the Pyrenees to France.

She, orphans and fellow exiles settled in Carsac, a village in the Dordogne, where she became involved in the maquis, resisting the German occupation. Català wrote: “In the civil war and the second world war, we women were not assistants, we were fighters.” In France she married Albert Roger. She was arrested in November 1943. After interrogation and torture in Limoges, she was sent to Ravensbrück in February 1944. Prisoner 27534, Català witnessed friends murdered. The seven companions of her hut all died. Her husband died at the end of the war, shortly after his release from Bergen-Belsen.

Living in France, Català got married again, to a Spanish exile, Félix Sancho, and she surprised herself by having two children, Margarita and Lluís – she had thought that the experiments conducted on women in Ravensbrück had left her sterile. In 1978, with the Francoist regime at an end, she returned to Catalonia, living in Rubí near Barcelona. She devoted her time to leading the Amical de Ravensbrück, an anti-fascist organisation of camp survivors, and to giving talks in schools.

All who heard Català speak remember her directness and passion. In the classrooms there was absolute silence. She liked to tell how she overheard a girl explain to another after one talk: “That’s the woman who defeated Hitler.” She was widely honoured in Catalonia: 2015 was officially Neus Català Year there. Her last political action came on 1 October 2017, when she voted in the disputed referendum in favour of Catalan independence.

In 2010, after a fall, she moved to an old people’s home in the village of her birth. She collaborated with Carme Martí in a novelised version of her life, Un Cel de Plom (A Leaden Sky, 2012), in which she explained: “I wanted to see it all. To see so as to explain. To explain what my eyes saw to everyone. Because it’s a duty. Because I survived and I have a moral duty to the women, so forgotten, who died in the death camps … I never, never cried before a Nazi. I only cried at night … They stole my sleep, but they never took my freedom or life.”

Félix died in 2001. Català is survived by her children.

​The values of the Spanish Republic - freedom, progress and solidarity - are also the values of today’s Europe. Eighty years on, it is fitting to remember the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.
Csilla Kiss
14 April 2011
From Open Democracy 


The passions stirred by the commemoration and official memorialisation of the Spanish Civil War even today are a reminder of the enduring principle of solidarity

The Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed eighty years ago, on 14 April, 1931, after the monarchy’s supporters lost the elections against the republicans. The Spanish population greeted the proclamation of the republic with serious hopes: not only the lower classes, who expected an improvement in their lives, but also the bourgeoisie. All expected that the Republic would lead Spain into the 20th century, since the Spanish Republic was first and foremost an attempt at modernisation. It extended political and civil rights to those hitherto deprived of them, which meant the increasing of the rights of the working classes, the introduction of public education, and the emancipation of women. 

Unfortunately, the Republic had only a short time to carry out these tasks. As is well known, only five years later, in1936, the military rebellion of General Franco pushed Spain into a three-year long bloody civil war, after their coup d’état and hopes for a quick grab of power were foiled. Their victory in 1939 resulted in Franco’s thirty-six-year long dictatorship. The legacy of these tumultuous years is evident today.

The Second Spanish Republic was not born under a friendly star: its international environment was shaped by the 1929 economic crisis and its consequences, as well as by the European advance of the extreme right. Domestically the government, composed mainly of liberal and centre-left parties came into conflict with the most powerful groups of Spanish society. Confrontation was inevitable with three such groups, which were also the strongest supporters of the monarchy: the big landowners, the Catholic Church and the army. The secular policy of the Republic, based on the separation of church and state, the introduction of laic education, of civil marriage and divorce, deprived the church of its privileges in social organisation, education and culture. Moreover, while these groups, together with the monarchists and the newly formed extreme right parties such as the Falange, constituted the Republic’s right-wing opponents, the government also had to contend with those left-wing republicans which demanded more radical reforms: the various workers’ parties, trade unions, especially the anarchists which were particularly strong in Spain, the socialists, and the not yet very numerous communists. However, the government was able to handle – or as the participants called it, ‘brutally repress’ – these groups or their actions.

The general impression that the Spanish Republic was primarily a left-wing system is not far from reality, if we consider that its supporters belonged to the political centre or centre-left and the radical left also supported this form of government. On 14 April, 1931, for the first time oligarchy was replaced with the moderate centre-left. The winner of the elections in February 1936, the Popular Front, was also based on a wide coalition of centre-left and left-wing political parties and trade unions. This coalition was formed because the right-wing government that came to power in 1934 started to reverse the previous reforms, and those supporting the reforms concluded that they could only win together. Such a coalition was obviously inspired by the French example (Léon Blum’s government) as well as by fear of the advance of fascism, but it also shows that during its short life the Spanish Republic functioned as a democratic parliamentary system based on competitive elections and political alliances. And while the Popular Front government enjoyed the support of numerous workers’ parties and trade unions, at this time there was no workers’ party in the government. This blatantly belies the rebels’ propaganda that their coup d’état attempt intended to prevent a revolution and a communist takeover. In fact, it was the coup d’état itself, the following chaos and the temporary collapse of the government that facilitated the momentary success of revolutionary movements (the formation of a kind of “dual power”) as well as the strengthening of the Communist party.

Military coups and dictators appointed by kings had a tradition in Spain, and Franco and his supporters hoped for a similarly quick takeover when they rebelled on 16 July, 1936. This time, however, they faced the opposition of a part of the army and of the guardia civil, as well as the unorganized, but determined, resistance of the population, especially of the organized workers. The coup attempt thus turned into a long and bloody civil war, and what started as a Spanish affair soon acquired international dimensions.

Eighty years later, it is still imperative to mention the shameful behaviour of western democracies during the Spanish Civil War which, under the veil of “non-intervention”, refused all assistance to the republican government that any legitimate government has a right to claim, including the transfer of weapons bought by the government.  At the same time, they turned a blind eye to the material and military support offered to Franco and his rebels by Germany and Italy. Only the USSR supported the Spanish Republic, extracting a high price for its help.

Yet in marked contrast with the conduct of their governments, thousands of volunteers flooded Spain from numerous countries to help the Republic’s fight in the International Brigades. Their role was not simply symbolic, limited to the expression of solidarity, but a real and tangible military contribution.  This is evident in the three-year long resistance of Madrid, as well as the last desperate republican counter-attack at the Ebro river. Despite all this, the People’s Army, the workers’ militias and the International Brigades could only postpone, but not avoid defeat. On 1 April, 1939 Franco announced his victory and started his thirty-six-year long rule. 

Vengeance against republicans was cruel and brutal.  Everyone who supported the Republic, or whose sympathy for the republican cause could be assumed based on social status was made a target. Those who managed to cross into France did not generally fare much better: the anonymous refugees, the rank and file soldiers of the People’s Army and of antifascist parties were herded into concentration camps in the south. Later many of them participated in the French resistance, and if captured, ended up in German concentration camps. In vain they hoped that following Germany’s defeat the Allies would also rid Spain of Franco: the western powers did not desire another armed conflict with a non-belligerent party, and as the Cold War developed, in exchange for Franco’s anti-communist stance and his willingness to accommodate American military bases on Spanish territory the United States was ready to ignore the dictatorial nature of his rule.

Even if the international community behaved shamefully during the war, and pretended not to notice what was going on in Spain under Franco’s rule the memory of the Republic and the civil war did not fade amongst artists and intellectuals. For many the Spanish Republic’s fight against fascism signified the ‘last great cause’, as demonstrated by a great number of masterpieces, of which Picasso’s Guernica, Miro’s paintings and Hemingway’s writings are only the best known examples.

But while the civil war became the lyrical conscience of the European left, it was not only Franco’s official Spain dominated by the narrative of a ‘glorious crusade’, but the democratic transition that followed the dictator’s death and is still regarded as an exemplary route to democracy, that was also based on the ‘pact of forgetting’. Legally it took shape in the amnesty law, while socially it was expressed through the silence surrounding the civil war, the repression and the atrocities of the dictatorship.

Republican memory was liberated and officially sanctioned only at the 70th anniversary of the war. José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s socialist government, which came to power in 2004, played a significant role in carving out the historical memory of the Second Republic, its supporters and their heritage. It is expressed in the law quoted at the start of this piece, or in the strongly debated legislation about historical memory (Ley de la Memoria Histórica), which ordered the removal of Francoist memorials and monuments, and assists the identification and reburial of republican dead, the honouring of their memory. Yet the difficulties faced by social movements organised to discover and open mass graves and honour the memory of the victims, or the complications surrounding Judge Baltasar Garzón who took up and assisted their cause, testify to the passions stirred by the war even today. While the conflicts created by the law demonstrate that the memory of the civil war and dictatorship can still divide Spanish society, the reforms implemented during the transition and in the recent past follow the best traditions of the Republic, this time hopefully permanently.

In the light of all this the sometimes tense relations between Spain and the Vatican is unsurprising and was not eased by the beatification of priests killed by republicans in the war. This gives the impression that the Spanish Catholic church, which has not yet apologized for supporting Franco’s rebellion and dictatorship, would prefer to continue to solely remember the victims on Franco’s side, forgetting the bloody crimes committed by Franco and his supporters against republicans, not only during the war, but also in the repression that followed. All this happened with the enthusiastic assistance of the church, while the Republican victims could not even be commemorated. The need to remove Francoist memorials is also a sensitive issue for the church, as commemorative plaques are visible on numerous church walls, listing the names of those who fell “for God and Spain” - that is, in the fight against the Republic.

At the same time, the values of the Spanish Republic are also the values of today’s Europe. In the 2006 book L’homme européen Jorge Semprun draws attention to the constitution of the Second Republic as a potential inspiration for Europe, and, we might add, to any contemporary state committed to freedom, progress and solidarity.  Eighty years on, it is fitting to remember this legacy of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.

From Jacobin, 11 April 2019

Data theft, spying, fabricated documents. The Spanish state is trying to derail Podemos and its challenge to elites.


​
It’s been described as Spain’s equivalent of Watergate. With less than three weeks before Spain heads to the polls for a knife-edge general election, its political arena has been rocked by a series of revelations over spying operations directed at the left-wing party Podemos. On March 27 it was disclosed that the presiding judge in the trial of disgraced police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo had opened an investigation into the 2015 theft of the mobile phone of Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias’s assistant, Dina Bousselham, believing that it had been stolen by Interior Ministry officials. Private messages taken from the phone were later published by right-wing press outlets to whip up controversy over offhand comments the Podemos leader had made about a conservative TV presenter.

This was only the beginning. The following day Villajero, who is on trial for running extortion and espionage operations against political targets, admitted to spying on Iglesias as part of a “criminal” investigation, moreover insinuating that former vice premier Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría (of the right-wing Partido Popular) had been aware of the operation. His testimony was then followed by the disclosure that high-ranking officials in the Interior Ministry had granted residency to a Venezuelan man in April 2016 in exchange for documents purporting to show the existence of offshore bank accounts belonging to Iglesias and other Podemos leaders. The payments in the accounts were meant to have come from the Cuban intelligence services and the Chávez government in Venezuela. Though never verified by the police, and later proven to be false, the information was leaked to the right-wing outlet OK Diario in May 2016 and then circulated throughout national media, at a time when Podemos and the Socialists (PSOE) were negotiating over a possible government coalition.

The intent behind these moves was clear: to harness the Spanish state’s law enforcement agencies to smear Podemos and derail talks on creating a coalition of the Left as they reached a critical juncture. Those responsible came from figures in the highest echelons of Mariano Rajoy’s Partido Popular (PP) government, who sought to cling onto to power after inconclusive elections. A 2017 parliamentary inquiry found that “the investigation and persecution of political adversaries” took place with “the knowledge and consent” of the PP’s Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz, citing as one example the fabrication of the so-called PISA report on illegal Podemos funding.

Yet the scandal cannot simply be blamed on the PP. To frame this affair in liberal terms, as a straightforward abuse of state power by the governing party, is to ignore how actors from across the Spanish oligarchy came together in a coordinated attack aimed at neutralizing Podemos. As Iglesias has explained, this is a “criminal plot that links corrupt police to the media and major businessmen” and which “cannot operate” without the interaction of these various elements.

Nor do these revelations leave current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (PSOE) untouched. In the latest twist, last Friday his deputy communications chief Alberto Pozos was forced to resign after it was revealed that as editor of Interviú magazine, he had handled the data stolen from the phone of Iglesias’s assistant. With Pozos now under investigation and some of the latest revelations taking place under Sánchez’s watch — such as the hacking of the security camera at the home of Iglesias and Podemos deputy leader Irene Montero — uncomfortable questions are been raised for the PSOE government. With the campaign heating up, Podemos is now aiming to shift the attention onto the premier’s own failure to confront shadowy forces at work within the Spanish state.

The Plot
In April 2016 a Spanish police chief inspector, José Angel Fuentes, traveled to New York to meet with former Venezuelan minister Rafael Isea. In the recording of the meeting, which was released last week, Fuentes asks the Chávez-era minister to provide dirty laundry on Podemos, telling Isea that “we don’t care if the document are good [i.e., real] or not” as Podemos won’t be able to disprove them. Fuentes belonged to the so-called Patriotic Brigade, a group of high-level police officers and Interior Ministry employees, including Villajero, who were tasked with damaging the political rivals of Mariano Rajoy’s PP government.

Before Podemos was founded in 2014, the Brigade’s chief target were pro-independence parties in Catalonia. In the run up to the 2012 Catalan elections “a police report with no date or signature, and which nobody at the Interior Ministry has ever taken responsibility for” was leaked to the press. In it, former Catalan premier Jordi Pujol was alleged to have concealed millions in Swiss bank accounts. The case against Pujol is still ongoing, but in other cases the information was simply fabricated — as for example with the ex-mayor of Barcelona Xavier Trías. Again the timing was strategic, with El Mundo newspaper publishing claims, during the run-up to the first independence plebiscite in November 2014, that Trías possessed €12.9 million euro in Swiss accounts. This turned out to be completely false.

The campaign against Podemos followed a similar pattern beginning shortly after the party’s foundation in 2014 and reaching its height after its historic breakthrough at the December 2015 elections. Some of the early attempts to smear the insurgent anti-austerity force were outlandish, even for the paranoid Spanish right, with the Patriotic Brigade seeking to link the party’s finances to drug cartels, Colombia’s FARC rebels, and even Hezbollah. Another crackpot theory found in one of the Brigades’ reports claimed Hugo Chávez was the real founder of the party, with “top Bolivarian experts” planning its organization down to the last detail.

Yet in the crucial nine months in which Spain was without a permanent government between January and September 2016, Villajero and co. got serious. They leaked two internal police reports, as well as contents from the stolen mobile, in a bid to kill Podemos’s momentum and scuppering coalition negotiations with the PSOE. The first of these, known as the PISA report, came only weeks after the party first entered the Spanish parliament and claimed that Iglesias’s formation had received illegal funding from Venezuela and Iran, which supposedly included millions of euros “from the government in Tehran.” The second was the report on Iglesias’s supposed offshore bank accounts in the Caribbean, which was then followed in July by the scandal over Iglesias’s private text messages.

The media impact these produced, and the weight attached to the fabricated leaks was only possible, however, with the collusion of the country’s press and television outlets. A key figure in this respect is right-wing journalist Eduardo Inda, who has operated as a sort of “middle-man” linking together Villajero and his Patriotic Brigade to major media outlets and business leaders. A close confidant of construction billionaire and Real Madrid Chairman Florentino Perez, Inda published exclusives on Podemos, such as the PISA report, on his news website OK Diario — relying on information received from Villajero. As a regular on many of Spain’s most popular news panel shows, he was then given a national platform in which to disseminate the smears further.

If major news outlets could not easily publish such unverified police documents, which lacked official stamps and signatures, or data from a stolen phone, the frenzy manufactured around the OK Diario leaks could itself be reported on. Podemos was forced to spend several weeks fighting the accusations.

TV stations’ and big newspapers’ willingness to play their part is not so surprising when we consider who owns them. Mediaset España, which includes two of Spain’s four commercial television networks as well as various cable channels, has as its controlling shareholder ex-Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, with other investors including vulture fund Blackrock. The largest shareholder of Atresmedia, which owns the country’s other two commercial networks, is the Lara family, one of the country’s richest and, at the time, a major investor in Sabadell bank. Meanwhile Grupo Prisa, which includes Spain’s leading daily El País and the country’s major radio station Cadena Ser, is controlled by the likes of Amber Capital, HSBC, Santander Bank, and Telefonica.

These corporate and financial elites had a clear material interest in seeing Podemos’s advance halted and reversed. Indeed as the ex-editor of center-right newspaper El Mundo David Jiménez has recently explained, such “elites viewed Podemos’ arrival in government with terror and took the decision to avert it.” Elaborating on this Jiménez continues:

When we speak of political power or economic and media power, we normally speak as if they were independent of each other. And it is not like that. This is a triumvirate of power, with common interests, and when they want to crush someone — when their machinery is put into operation — the three work in unison … [In 2015–16] Pablo Iglesias was seen as a possible governing alternative. In some surveys, they were second, not far behind the Popular Party. [Podemos] had broken through in the European elections [in 2014] and the elites were terrified. Some thought they were going to confiscate their beach houses. They compared it to what was happening in Venezuela. And then I believe the decision was taken amongst the establishment — i.e., amongst this triumvirate of which I spoke before of political, media and economic power — to decide to avoid the coming to power of Podemos.

There is no doubt all this has taken its toll on Iglesias, both politically and personally. In personal terms “it is not easy living beneath the hatred of the [dominant] class.” In the words of Manolo Monereo “those who have suffered it know its insufferable, systematic character that frays the nerves, destroys your privacy and fabricates scandal after scandal against you.” In political terms, the constant attacks have added to a certain disenchantment with Podemos, as well as progressive politics in Spain more generally, which has seen the party fall from its high of nearly 21 percent to its current polling position of around 13–14 percent.

The Campaign
The Center for Sociological Research (CIS), Spain’s main polling body, has shown this week that 42 percent of Spaniards are still undecided on which party to vote for on April 28. At this point in the last campaign in 2016, this figure stood at only 32 percent. So, if Spain now faces the most uncertain general elections in living memory, how is this still-unfolding story likely to affect them?

The election campaign began with a direct confrontation between Podemos and the Spanish media, as a fired-up Iglesias returned to the political fray after several months of paternity leave. In a comeback rally at the Reina Sofia Square in Madrid, Iglesias promised to deliver some “home truths” to supporters both on how power operates in Spain and where it resides. He launched into a polemic directed against the oligarchs and key financial interests in the country, arguing that these unaccountable families and corporate groups “have more power than any MP or elected representative.” Following this assertion, he recounted a meeting he says he had with a director of an Ibex 35 [stock-exchange]-listed firm last October, who told him “They’re coming for you, Iglesias. They didn’t like the photo of you and Sánchez [signing the budget deal] one bit and [so] they’re coming after you.”

Iglesias then took aim at the Spanish media. Over the following weeks he doubled down on this argument in a number of public appearances, taking several presenters to task over media ownership and the corporate capture of Spain’s largest journalistic outlets. Iglesias’s comments inevitably provoked a backlash from many such outlets — notably one from liberal journalist Ana Pastor, whose husband, Antonio García Ferreras (also director of TV channel La Sexta), was confronted on air this week by Iglesias, as the Podemos leader accused his channel of being “one of the main protectors of Inda,” i.e., the middle-man between the “Patriotic Brigade” and media.

Iglesias’s formation has sought to capitalize on the Villarejo revelations, incorporating them into its electoral strategy. It has especially sought to use the latest revelations to help shift the terms of the campaign debate. So far this has proven effective in pushing the media’s focus away from the national question and the ongoing Catalan trial — the terrain on which the Spanish right and the PSOE are seeking to contest these elections. It has instead directed debate towards questions of structural power and how it is maintained, putting the media on the back foot in the process.

It is thus little surprise that the PSOE has proven one of the groups most silent on the latest Villarejo revelations, seeking to minimize the reach of a story it now seems impossible to simply bury. Not only does it benefit from a media framing of the election that avoids these questions of structural power, but its own record looks far from clean. Its connections to the Villarejo case in fact go further than just Sánchez’s Deputy Communications Chief, since last autumn his then-Justice Minister Dolores Delgado was also found to have been implicated in the broader conspiracy surrounding the former police chief.

Just as Pablo Casado’s appeal as the new PP leader partly stems from the fact he represents a fresh-faced candidature, unsullied by the series of corruption scandals that have blighted his party in recent years, such links to one of Spain’s most serious political scandals in recent times risk tarnishing Sánchez’s relatively untainted image. It also risks undermining the overdue “clean-up” in public life that ostensibly formed the basis of his no-confidence motion last summer. Since it went forward, the Socialists have sought to prove that the party’s social agenda and the relative transparency Podemos has brought to Spanish politics in recent years could be carried out without their presence in government.

Iglesias insisted, however, that Sánchez’s PSOE “is not capable of carrying out such a clean-up in the state” alone. He cited as a litmus test Podemos’s demands last year that the notorious Franco-era police torturer “Billy the Kid” be stripped of his medals and all other state-sanctioned honors or decorations he has received. “[The PSOE] didn’t do it,” Iglesias observed. For this reason, he argued, it is fundamentally important that Podemos not only facilitates a government from the outside, as it did last June when it helped lift Sánchez into office, but that it helps form a left-wing coalition of the kind thwarted three years ago.

Podemos faces an uphill battle in this election campaign. Media both within and outside of Spain are framing it as the ballot that may confirm the decline of the left-wing force that lit up European politics only a few years ago. Yet this scandal may provide an opportunity for Podemos to turn the campaign on its head, including by imposing a change of course on the ruling PSOE itself. As Iglesias told a rally in Zaragoza this week: “When we tell the government that this smells bad, they take it as an attack. It’s not an attack. We’re willing to work with the PSOE to clean up this cesspit in the state.”


jacobinmag.com/2019/04/podemos-spying-pablo-iglesias-psoe-elections?fbclid=IwAR26pOE85wuFXVp7n1e4gbsZrv6pcLmj4DCSM7sXuEpTi-7Cwc2QtyHYtmU




​

When 12 Catalan pro-independence leaders filed into Spain’s Supreme Court in Madrid this February and sat down on its smart, burgundy-coloured benches, media and public interest in the “trial of the century,” as it has been dubbed here in Spain, could not have been higher.

The 12, including former Catalan vice-president Oriol Junqueras, face charges including rebellion, sedition and the misuse of public funds, mostly linked to the illegal pro-independence referendum in October 2017. Rebellion alone carries a maximum prison sentence of 25 years.

Watching from outside the police lines in February – beyond the bag checks, the barriers and the block on anybody without accreditation from approaching any closer than 100 metres of the court’s front doors – I could see a group of some 50 hard-right sympathisers chanting slogans about the unity of Spain and yelling insults at the 100 or so pro-Catalan supporters on the other side of the street.

Credit given for originality where it’s is due, the high point of the right-wing demonstration came when they unfurled a massive poster of the 12 separatist leaders caricatured as demons; complete with horns, pitchforks and tails. 

What was telling was how the bulk of the general public that day simply gave the protestors a quick glance at most and moved on. However, the message inside the courts from Spain’s new hard-right party, Vox, is much harder to ignore. 
That’s because a quirk of the Spanish justice system allows anyone to become a co-accuser and take part in court proceedings, as Vox have done in the Catalan leaders’ trial, gaining a golden opportunity to put their hardline, anti-separatist agenda on display. 

Vox insist their role in the trial is not political.

Yet with electoral promises as extreme as arresting the current president of Catalonia, the pro-independence Quim Torra, and making Catalonia’s separatist parties illegal, Vox’s mere presence in a case handling Spain’s biggest constitutional crisis in four decades carries massive symbolic weight. That’s particularly true when one of Vox’s lawyers in the trial, Javier Ortega Smith, is also their Secretary General.
Seeing Vox cross-question the Catalan separatists on a near-daily basis in the country’s biggest court provides further “proof” to the right-wing segment of the Spanish electorate most outraged by the Catalan pro-independence campaign that the new extremists are the genuine keepers of Spain’s pro-unity flame.

The trial also boosts Vox’s profile across the political board and guarantees them media coverage all the way through the upcoming electoral campaign: for a party that only made its breakthrough in Spanish politics last December, when it unexpectedly gained 12 seats in the Andalusian regional parliament, that’s a huge bonus.

Across most of Spain interest in the trial remains strong too, despite the realisation that, with ever longer delays as each of the 600-plus witnesses is heard, the verdict is likely not to be reached until well after the summer.  

Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, it is in rural Catalonia, where separatist support is strongest, that reminders of the trial are impossible to avoid.

As I discovered when I spent a week driving through the countryside in March, road surfaces in some areas have been grafittied with painted yellow ribbons, the colour and symbol used by supporters of the pro-independence leaders. In towns and villages, lines of lamp-posts are daubed in yellow. Roadside crash barriers can be found draped with curtains of yellow plastic ribbons, sometimes running for kilometres at a time.

While on the coast of Catalonia and in the big cities it’s not so noticeable, inland it’s hard to find a café or bar TV that isn’t tuned into the live daily coverage of the trial.

The knock-on effect of the court proceedings on the elections in Catalonia is not just about roadside symbols and TV audience shares. A poll published this week showed pro-separatist support in Catalonia had risen to 48.4 percent, narrowly short of the all time record peak set in October 2017. The biggest shift in support was in favour of the ERC, Mr Junqueras party.
A massive 79 percent of Catalans now want a referendum on independence too – something outgoing PM Pedro Sánchez has repeatedly said will not happen.

As for Vox, most recent polls suggest they have little chance of winning more than a couple of parliamentary seats in Catalonia; but the consequences of the trial in Spain more broadly – and especially among right-leaning voters – could really count. This April, Vox’s goal is to become Spain’s first far-right party for 40 years to win seats in a general election: at the moment they are expected to garner around 11 percent of the vote, and some 20-30 seats.

That wouldn’t be so easy to ignore as 50 right-wing protestors yelling outside a court house.

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https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/spain-catalonia-independence-trial-separatists-far-right-nationalism-vox-a8860191.html?fbclid=IwAR2jWUnERrJDwQU-WRca8e5S_dJcwAR0HTgDbDR0xxcSsQxAI_cB8sg5Mz0

Rural demonstrators from 24 provinces marched on the Spanish capital to call for access to better infrastructure and services in Spain’s dwindling towns and villages

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Madrid on Sunday to demand an urgent solution to Spain’s problem of depopulation. Nearly 100 organizations from 24 provinces took part in the protest, which organizers labeled as the “revolt of an empty Spain.” They were demanding a cross-party plan that would help them to continue living in their dwindling villages and provincial capitals.

The protest was organized by depopulation advocacy groups Teruel Existe (Teruel Exists) and Soria ¡Ya!. Many rural protesters from towns in Huesca, Albacete, Zaragoza, Zamora, Ciudad Real, La Rioja, Granada and Jaén came to the Spanish capital to demand access to better infrastructure and services. “We’re not asking for a hospital in every town, or an AVE station [a high-speed rail in Spain], or a Maluma concert. We want real things,” said Emiliano Antolín, a 38-year-old mechanic from Palencia, a city in northern Spain. “We have internet at the generous speed of three megas. It’s impossible to compete with those who have 300.”

n Spain, 48% of municipalities have a population density of less than 12.5 inhabitants per square kilometer, a figure that the European Union considers to be very low. Between 2011 and 2017, approximately 62% of towns lost inhabitants, according to government data, and even cities with a population between 20,000 and 50,000 inhabitants have been in decline in the last decade.

Ahead of the April 28 general elections, electoral campaigns have focused their efforts on these dwindling towns by including measures against depopulation in a bid to win votes. In fact, representatives from parties such as Ciudadanos (Citizens), the Popular Party (PP), Unidas Podemos and Vox attended the protest – but not everyone was happy about their presence.“People don’t want the politicians here,” said Vanessa García, the spokesperson for Soria ¡Ya!. “This is a citizen protest. We are here because of them.”

“We are first-class citizens, just like everyone else. I want my town to survive,” added Miriam Martín from Piedrahíta, a municipality of Ávila which has 1,800 inhabitants. Martín has been working as a professional rural developer for the past 39 years. “[Politicians] impose solutions with an urban perspective. We want them to listen to us.”

“The hemorrhaging will not be stopped. Today in Spain, 26 provincial capitals are losing inhabitants. And if these capitals are declining, imagine what is happening to towns and villages,” said journalists Manuel Campo Vidal, the former president of the Television Academy, and Paloma Zuriaga, director of the National Radio of Spain (RNE), who read the protesters’ manifesto on Sunday. “We need to react. The revolt of an empty Spain is already in motion and it won’t be silenced... Addressing rural Spain, an empty Spain, is a matter of justice.”

MARÍA SOSA TROYA

Madrid 2 ABR 2019 - 
From El Pais in English
English version by Asia London Palomba.

elpais.com/elpais/2019/04/01/inenglish/1554107629_170580.html?fbclid=IwAR2NXWsqdIqMNNKCOmGTywj8tqcWOjSRyGO-GJHYJ3hzaOZtOGqmixKXd9U

A portrait of Federico Garcia Lorca hangs from a wall in a restaurant near the site where archaeologists are searching for a mass grave of victims of the civil war on November 19, 2014 in Alfacar, near Granada, Spain. Pablo Blazquez Dominguez / Getty

​AN INTERVIEW WITH IAN GIBSON, from Jacobin magazine. 2 April 2019
INTERVIEW BY
Tommy Greene
Eoghan Gilmartin
Eighty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of Franco's victims still lie in unmarked graves. Identifying the dead is a vital means of providing Spain with closure — and making sure fascism doesn't rear its head again.


The Spanish Civil War came to an end on April 1, 1939, only days after Francisco Franco’s Nationalist troops entered Madrid. By the time the capital fell, following a long siege, the war’s body count had reached nearly half a million. About 150,000 of those deaths directly owed to the Francoite terror; a further 20,000 Republican prisoners would be executed in the immediate wake of the Nationalists’ victory. Thousands more died in concentration camps across the country or in refugee camps over the border in southern France.

In the words of Francoite general Queipo de Llano, it was “necessary to spread terror … to create the impression of mastery, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do.” Historian Paul Preston later called it the “Spanish Holocaust.” Yet it seems difficult for the country to reflect on the dead and those who orchestrated the mass killings. The bloodbath at the foundation of the Franco regime now lies decades in the past; Spanish democracy was re-founded in the 1970s precisely on the “pact to forget” and a bipartisan amnesty.

Nonetheless, since Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist-led government assumed office last summer, historical memory has returned to the forefront of the political agenda. Just a month into his term as premier, Sánchez announced that Franco’s remains, along with those of Falange founder Antonio Primo de Rivera, would be exhumed from the shrine built for the two at the Valley of the Fallen, just north of Madrid. The dictator built the monument for himself with the forced labor of thousands of Republican prisoners, who all now lie in unmarked graves. Decades later, the site is finally to be “resignified” in a belated effort to tackle this dark chapter of Spanish history.

While Franco organized the bloodbath, on the other side of the political divide this monstrous legacy is also embodied by the poet Federico García Lorca, killed at the beginning of the Civil War. In the words of journalist Antonio Maestre, Lorca “was left to rot in an unmarked pit in the hills outside Granada after his assassination by Falangists.”

Lorca’s work, his life and tragic death have been a major focus of the Irish writer Ian Gibson’s career. A vocal critic of the Spanish right’s treatment of Franco’s dictatorship and its painful legacy, Gibson has been at the forefront of efforts to locate and exhume modern Spain’s most celebrated poet.

Eoghan Gilmartin and Tommy Greene sat down with the internationally renowned Hispanist to discuss what this historic anniversary means to Spain, as well as the challenges facing it at another important juncture in its democratic history.
One of the discourses perpetuated around the Civil War on the Spanish right is that everyone is guilty for what happens in war — that neither side’s hands were clean. As the longtime leader of the Popular Party (PP) in Madrid Esperanza Aguirre put it “there were heroes and villains on both sides.” Yet it was not only the scale of the killing that differentiates Nationalist violence from that on the Republican side but also its systematic nature. It was the planned extermination of all political opposition.

IG
Yes, it was a deliberate policy engineered before the war. Prior to the Nationalists launching their military uprising, they had come to the decision that if the coup failed, they were going to wipe out half of Spain. The American journalist Jay Allen conducted an interview with Franco just before he crossed over to the Spanish mainland [from Spanish territory in Morocco in July 1936]. In it Allen tells Franco that victory would require killing half of Spain, and Franco’s answer was he was willing to “pay any price.” He viewed the war as a crusade against communism.

From the beginning, the fascists initiated a campaign of mass terror. In the first weeks of the war came the massacre in the Southern city of Badajoz. As Franco’s troops approached Madrid, the ordinary people knew what was going to happen and so naturally, their reaction was violent. They killed priests and anyone wearing a tie. And yet you cannot compare the two sides’ behavior. There was brutality on both sides, but on the fascist side it was methodical and systematic. The numbers are terrible — there are still 115,000 bodies in unmarked graves.

The Nationalist side then hardened into a brutal dictatorship. Something dreadful that people who lived through this told me is that the prisoners all thought in 1944 the Allies were going to liberate Spain from Franco. That was the hope that they held onto. But then the truth dawned that that was not going to happen, and it meant they were going to be there for forever, as it were, with the threat of death and torture hanging over them.

TG
You are known internationally for your work on the murdered poet Federico García Lorca — probably the most famous victim of Franco’s terror. Your first book investigated his death, placing it in the wider context of the Nationalist killings in Granada. What is the significance of his death here?

I went to Granada to work on my PhD in 1965. Franco still had ten more years to live and it was the first time I experienced a police state. You could feel the sense of fear everywhere. People were always worried about who was listening. I was originally there to do research into the rural roots of Lorca’s poetry but after a few months the peasants started to open up about what had happened there at the beginning of the Civil War. You are talking about the murder of thousands of people in a very small city. I realized I had an opportunity to write something important — to document the terror in the region and so putting aside my thesis, I wrote The Death of Lorca.

For me, Lorca symbolizes all the disappeared people of Spain. We are talking about a poetic genius — one of the greatest poets that Europe has produced. Everything he wrote was created in the twenty years before he was murdered at thirty-eight. He is the national poet of this country and yet they have not been able to find his body. And so I see him as symbolizing all those who lie out there in unmarked graves. After Cambodia, Spain is the country with highest number of disappeared people in the world. Even the Pope, in an interview on Spanish television just this week, has said that the country cannot hope to look to the future until it buries its dead.

All ancient cultures knew you cannot leave people out to be eaten by the vultures and rats. The issue could be dealt with if the Right was able to be a bit magnanimous instead of telling us we are “reopening old wounds” or that it is an evil leftist plot. They were able to bury their dead eighty years ago but the other side were not even allowed to look for the graves of their loved ones.

The only place where this has happened is in Malaga. At the beginning of war, the Italian fascists went in with Franco’s troops and there was absolute butchery. They killed something like 4,000 people — of which they have exhumed 3,000 bodies. The conservative Popular Party mayor Francisco de la Torre spoke at the exhumation, underlining that what had happened was a crime and has to be acknowledged as such. This should not be that difficult for the Right.

EG
Yet if anything the Spanish right seem to be going in the opposite direction. The emergence of the extremist Vox party is now dragging other right-wing parties in an ever more reactionary direction. It has vehemently opposed policies around historical memory in places like Andalusia. How do you view their trajectory?

IG
Vox is very interesting. Before its breakthrough, the extreme right found its place within the Popular Party — the party of government on the Right. Now, with Vox, it has gained its own autonomous expression. For me this is better as we can see who they are, what they look like, and how they express themselves without any of the subterfuge there was before.

There has always been a part of the Spanish right whose allegiance to democracy is skin-deep. I remember one PP minister who said that “a lot of us lived very well under Franco.” Of course they bloody did! There was nowhere in Europe that the rich lived so well. Their kids were the only ones who could afford to pay for university — to study law, etc. — while at the same time a huge amount of wealth was amassed and stashed away outside of Spain. This was the result of forty years of unchallenged oligarchy.

When I see the footage of Vox’s leader Santiago Abascal astride his horse, like a Spanish version of Putin, I am reminded of some the old Falangists that I met in the 1960s — this sense of machismo gone mad. All that matters are the muscles and, of course, the prick, while women are mere objects.

I remember meeting Ernesto Giménez Caballero, who published The Spanish Genius in 1934. It is a fascist manual. In works like that you get a sense of a basic evil built into fascism. It is an ideology about the weak and the strong — essentially about eliminating the weak and degenerate from society.

TG
A recent investigation by Spanish journalist Carlos Hernandez has uncovered the existence of almost three hundred concentration camps in Spain — about 50 percent more than previously thought — in which over a million Spaniards were imprisoned. There have also been revelations surrounding Francoite eugenics programs. How much more of this kind of information do you think is yet to come to light?

IG
You are right that more and more information has come to light in recent years. The terrible thing, though, is that many of the older generation are going to die before the remains of their loved ones are found. Part of the difference with the Hitler and Mussolini regimes, is that this was a forty-year dictatorship — and that is a long time. The Amnesty Law in 1975 [i.e., at the end of the Franco regime] aimed simply to turn the page on the past. This made any kind of investigation into the atrocities very difficult.

But the work is now being done. A huge study has just been published on the terror in the La Mancha region. A group of researchers spent four years tracking down all the families, seeking documentation, filling in the gaps, etc. The Right refuses to acknowledge the genocide and cannot accept the thesis of Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust. But there was a holocaust. It happened and the evidence is mounting up.

TG
You have been critical of former Socialist (PSOE) prime minister Felipe González’s inaction on addressing the issue of historical memory during his fourteen years in power. Do the Socialists have to assume a certain responsibility here?

IG
Yes, I think that when the PSOE was elected in 1982 with a huge overall majority, that was the time to act — to put into motion a serious process of historical memory and reconciliation. In an interview with the former El País editor Juan Luis Cebrián, González said a leading general had implored him not to touch the issue of Francoite repression because the army was still very dangerous and likely to retaliate. He then told Cebrián that he realized now he should and could have acted, but that this was not clear at the time.

I do not fully accept this excuse. They had this massive mandate from the Spanish people for change. But they did not risk it, did not have the moral courage to push ahead. At least the whole process could have been gotten under way — for example getting rid of the symbols, such as the fascist street names and statues of Franco that were dotted around the country. Some Socialist mayors did this in their towns and there were only mild protests, but González’s government never risked even going that far.

Now we are in a situation in which Franco is still in his mausoleum at the Valle de los Caídos in 2019. It is an outrage. There is no other equivalent monument to a fascist dictator in Europe. It is something they should be ashamed of, but shame is not a feeling which comes easy in this country, particularly to those on the Right. [Current Socialist prime minister] Pedro Sánchez decided to remove his remains last June but we are [still] waiting and waiting — there are endless delays and legal challenges. Now they are saying the exhumation will be May 10, but we do not know if that will be possible or not.

EG
Sánchez also recently became the first head of government to visit the graves of two of the most famous Republican exiles — poet Antonio Machado and the last president of the Second Republic, Manuel Azaña. What was the significance of this gesture?

IG
It was very important. Obviously, there was an electoral element to the visit, but it was more than that. Machado in particular has come to symbolize the half-million exiles who fled to France after Barcelona fell to Franco. This mass exodus, made up predominantly of ordinary people, were bombarded from ships in the Mediterranean and machine-gunned by German and Italian planes as they made their way to the border. On the eightieth anniversary of what is known as the Retirada (the withdrawal), it was important that Sánchez made this gesture.

EG
The early years of the Second Republic were an incredible moment culturally for Spain. The country was beginning to move in a more secular direction while you had a real flourishing of the arts as symbolized by the “Generation of ‘27” poets — the likes of Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, and even Pablo Neruda who was living in Madrid before the war. The fall of the Republic marks a break with this. How do you view this loss?

IG
The Republic was under threat from the word go, with the Church firmly against it and the fascists already plotting together with Mussolini’s regime. But that did not stop the incredible flowering that took place. Beginning in the 1920s, there was an extraordinary cultural scene in Madrid: foreign painters, the arrival of cinema, a booming theater scene, and this group of incredible poets and novelists known as the generation of ‘27. These young writers were also in contact with the previous generation, which included the likes of Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, and Antonio Machado. Madrid was a small city — everyone knew everyone else and you just had this exciting mix.

Then the military uprising wrecked it. It was an absolute cultural disaster — when you think of what was lost. We will never know what Spain could have been. Most of the country’s intellectuals were forced into exile or had been killed. You had the loss of documents and cultural artifacts — in the case of Lorca, his correspondence with Salvador Dalí. He was infatuated with Dalí and so in his letters tried to impress the painter. The few that remain are extraordinary documents. And this is the same with so many writers and intellectuals. There are important holes in and gaps in their works and archives.

The result is a kind of truncated culture. It is truly heartbreaking.


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The Spanish Civil War ended eighty years today with Franco's victory. But for opponents of Spanish fascism, the brutal repression of popular culture and democracy was only beginning.

André Malraux had called it a “lyrical illusion.” But the fall of Madrid marked the end of the dream. In his novel Man’s Hope, Malraux had told of the moment in which the romantic revolutionaries believed that they could do anything. But after Franco’s troops came, the aesthetic of resistance lingered on only in the idyllic memory of the banner across the Calle Toledo proclaiming “No pasaràn.” Such fine words had found an insuperable enemy in the more prosaic reality of the steel dropped by the German and Italian planes.

April 1 marks eighty years since the end of the Spanish Civil War. The pain and drama of that tragedy have not changed one iota. For this finale was not the end of things, but the next stage in the cultural and political genocide that had begun with the military uprising in 1936. Franco’s victory was but the beginning of the repression of a more advanced Spain that had been taking its first baby steps — the incipient ideas, consciousness, and morality that had provided an illusion of progress to the popular classes, to women, for culture and the arts.

Still today, we are living amid the moral rubble of that defeat. Indeed, the Francoite dictatorship prioritized the elimination of any trace of progressive mores or dissent. For four decades, national-Catholic culture subjugated freedom, literature, theater, critical thought, and educated thinking. Through this effort, the regime introduced the virus of what we call “sociological Francoism,” still today present in wide layers of Spanish society.

The regime’s continuing influence is expressed in the mindset that, notwithstanding the political and cultural genocide, the dictatorship was not so bad, because it brought good levels of economic growth and a Spain of order and security. In this sense, the social-engineering process which began some eighty years ago has proven very successful.

With the triumphal fascist parade through Madrid on March 28, 1939, there immediately began the burial of the voice of the defeated, of the democrats who had fought with such daring to resist the black stain spreading across Republican memory. The national-Catholic jackboots left footprints on the souls of the defeated, ploughing invisible scars on their skins. Despair spread among all those Spaniards who now had to hide their tears from the victors. They could be bitterly certain of the pain that would now be piled onto that of the past. It was a rage stripped of any epic element. For there is nothing heroic about just being able to survive.

Those Who Remained
After Franco’s victory, Madrid became a city of over a million cadavers. A silent and subdued fear won ground: tellingly of the population’s hunger, the pigeons and cats started to disappear. The rosary beads and the yoke and the arrows of the Falangist flag starved the dissenting of any oxygen. Hanging one’s head and stifling one’s thoughts became the everyday existence for all those liable to be considered “anti-Spanish elements.”

There were those who could not bear the stench: the maquis, the guerrilla fighters who took to the mountains to continue the fight against the regime and wait for some Falangist squads or the Guardia Civil to come hunting for them in the woodlands. There were the so-called topos (literally “moles”: those who hid away), of less military ardor and courage, who concealed their fear of being caught in one of the night-time raids, constantly watching themselves. They became “disappeared people” who dug their hideouts behind a trapdoor or within the walls of the kitchen where their wives and children lived.

There were men like Protasio Montalvo, who spent some thirty-eight years hidden in a basement. There were those who spent almost three decades buried alive behind a trapdoor, with a shotgun on hand — if the Falangists came, they would thus be prepared to kill themselves before they were arrested. A human metaphor for the history of the losers: always hidden, alone, silent, in the dark.

This darkness was unbearable even for some of the more humanist Falangists who rapidly lost their illusions, like the poet Luis Felipe Vivanco, weighed down by the error of his rapid support for the Francoite uprising. His sadness stained even the pages of his poetry:

How much more Spanish is our life

And more traditional our monstrosity

Greater the cruelty of the plan

That keeps us in this much-suffered peace.

As for the Spanish right, the victory of April 1, 1939 would harden it in a policy of constant aggression.

Indeed, this attitude has made itself felt in Spanish politics even in recent months, in a concrete and grotesque form. The increasingly unhinged right embodied in the Partido Popular and Ciudadanos, and its far-right excrescence Vox, are direct inheritors of this hostile approach to public life, still today beating their political adversaries over the head with national symbols. For them, anything that stands outside the norm must surely be an enemy.

Those Who Left
March 1939 was the end of the Spain that could have been. The national tale — the real one, not the fascist one — was written in the blood in the best of Spanish society, and the ink of those who could narrate its sorrow from exile. This sentiment was grasped better than anyone by Antonio Machado. Heading from Barcelona to Colliure (France) in December 1938 he expressed a grief-stricken but nonetheless razor-sharp sentiment: “For the strategists, for the politicians, for the historians, all this will be clear: we lost the war. But at a human level I am not so sure: perhaps we won.”

He was right on that count. The words of writers like Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, María Teresa León, and Max Aub would write the collective memory of the just Spain, of the homeland that had been stolen from us with the consent of the United States, Britain, and France.

In the Spanish case, too, there were collaborationist powers who looked the other way during the dictatorship, tarnished the memory of the heroes of the International Brigades, and doomed decent Spaniards to forty years of darkness. This was well-recorded by María Teresa León, the proud and melancholic poet who wore a fantastical military uniform in order to look good at political rallies: “They sacrificed us. We were the Spain with torn clothes and heads held high.”

Those Who Would Not Return
“I will never go back and set foot in that country of shit,” said Federico García Rodríguez, Lorca’s father. As for the son, he could never leave the land that buried him in some unknown place. It was a sorrow shared by those who carried the voice of the victims of the reprisals — those who left never to return. The bitterness of what had been, was no longer, and would never be, brought grief to all those struck by exile.

It is a wish of any exile to return to the yearned-for homeland. This same feeling ran through all those forced to leave as the victorious fascists entered Madrid. But there was to be no return to an idealized Spain, even if they could tread the same streets they had abandoned as the invading troops defiled the last Republican holdout. Max Aub described this heartbreak in 1969, when he was able to walk through lands that had now become strange to him: “I have come, but I have not returned.”

During his visit Aub asked to be taken to the Valley of the Fallen, the mausoleum in honor of Franco standing a few miles from Madrid. His travel companions did not understand why he wanted to visit the site honoring the very dictator who forced him to abandon his homeland, his friends, and family. Aub replied simply: “It’s not to honor him, but those [the Republican prisoners] who died building it.”

The memory kept alive by those who left Spain is still today absent in wide layers of Spanish society. Indeed, many of its leaders cruelly dismiss those who seek historic memory and restitution for Franco’s victims, accusing them of “digging up old bones.” The debate on the need to pay penance for what began rotting on April 1, 1939 remains a live issue in Spanish public life. The heirs to the political culture that won the war continue to reject an even symbolic recognition of the worst crimes perpetrated in twentieth-century Spain. Still now, they keep winning by erasing our memories. They fake pride in order to hide their shame.

In April 1939, a Spain that brought up its citizens through schooling, arts, and literatures was buried by a rancid Catholic traditionalism and the savage repression of all that was different. Eighty years have passed, and still today the Right want to deny us of our identity, of what reminds us of what could have been and wasn’t. Luis Cernuda provided an antidote to this forgetting when he paid tribute to the International Brigades who lost their lives so that we would not lose ours: “Remember it, and remind others, when you are disgusted of human baseness and angered by human harshness: This man alone, this act alone, this faith alone. Remember it and remind others.”​
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80 years ago today the Spanish Civil War ended. We speak to leftist MP Alberto Garzón about why Spain struggles to remember its fight against fascism.


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In March 1939 General Francisco Franco’s fascist troops entered Madrid, after having subjected the Spanish capital to a brutal two-and-half-year-long siege. When the Spanish civil war ended on April 1st, at least half a million people lay dead – including approximately 150,000 as a direct result of Francoist terror. In the aftermath, 20,000 Republican prisoners were executed and thousands more died in Francoist concentration camps or in refugee camps in Southern France. 

Though a defining moment in Spanish history, commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the Civil War’s end will be muted within the country itself. The wounds of Franco’s dictatorship and the brutal post-war years remain raw in contemporary Spain. In the following extract, from an interview to be published in the forthcoming edition of Tribune, the Unidos Podemos MP and United Left leader Alberto Garzón argues that Spain’s inability to come to terms with Francoist crimes is bound up with the limits to the country’s transition to democracy in the 1970s.  

The eightieth anniversary is an important date, but it’s almost better understood outside of Spain than it is inside the country itself. We had Franco’s coup d’etat in 1936, a civil war that lasted 3 years and then afterwards there was a dictatorship that was firstly an accessory to international fascism and then later gradually modified towards its particular Francoist model. This regime was of the extreme right, but with its own peculiarities.

When the Transition [to democracy, 1975-’81] came about, it was a transition directed and orchestrated by Francoist elites together with the opposition‘s own elites. It would not have emerged had it not been for working-class movements and civil society organisations coming out on the streets to confront repression, torture and suffering. They represented a force that was powerful enough to open a path towards a kind of democracy, but not one that was strong enough to overthrow the system. Therefore, what we had was a political transition that consisted of negotiation between two parties.

This allowed the Francoist regime to preserve some of its previous privileges. Advances were made, such as public healthcare, public education and formalised democracy. Certain prerogatives, however, were maintained and allowed to persist: the influence of the Catholic Church, for instance, is enshrined in the constitution; the conception of Spain as a unitary entity protected by the army; and, most importantly, economic power was not touched and did not change in any meaningful way. The large corporations that were greatly enriched during the years of the dictatorship continued to dominate during Spain’s return to democracy and not much has changed since then. Many of them are among the most powerful in the country today. The children that came from successive generations of Francoist ministers continue to make up the Spanish social elite. Many of the judges in Spain today are the children of parents who were judges in the era of Franco.

We have a country that has also inherited all the bad things from the Transition, as well as the good ones. And so, remembering the Transition also entails being conscious of the fact that a ‘pact of silence’ was made at the beginning of this period. It was said that, as those that carried out the Transition were in part responsible for the civil war, it would be better off not to speak about the war or the past ever again.

You have to think that former President Adolfo Suárez, whose name now adorns Madrid’s international airport, had previously been the head of the Falange. This is like being head of the National Socialist party in Germany earlier in the century. Since facts like these made for uncomfortable truths at the time, a mythologised narrative was constructed around the Transition which fostered a kind of amnesia. This was done in part so nobody would remember that the heads and directors of Spain’s national newspapers were those who had been propaganda chiefs during the Franco years, so that people would forget big business’ ties with Francoism and so on. In this way, Spanish elites sought to erase the recent past, including the [1931-1939] Second Republic and all that went with it.

This brings us to a paradox: the democratic values of the Second Republic and the struggles of the International Brigades are defended more widely and robustly outside of Spain than they are inside it. There are Second Republic combatants who went on to fight fascism in the French Resistance and who have had tributes paid to them in France and Germany. They haven’t any such commemoration in Spain. They died without even minimal recognition of their actions. This a historic anomaly – it doesn’t happen in Italy, it doesn’t happen in Germany, it doesn’t happen in France or the UK. But it does in Spain, because the Transition left this legacy.

Forty years after the Transition, new generations of Spaniards, politicised by the Indignados movement, identify in the majority as Republicans. The state is performing a number of manoeuvres in order to avoid any kind of questioning of a monarchy that was chosen by Francoism – and then later ratified in the Constitution. The official polling and survey company in Spain, CIS, in fact stopped asking about the monarchy in 2014 in order to avoid there being proof of the Republican sentiment that exists in this country.

On the eightieth anniversary I believe it should be appropriate for any democratic country to recognise those that fought against fascism. In Spain, unfortunately, this can’t happen because the country’s political Right sees itself as the inheritors of fascism; the left tradition of the Socialist Party views itself as the inheritor of the Transition, which of course isn’t the same. But, in the end, neither of the two take meaningful action to recognise this past.

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