When I was five years old and living in Argentina, my capacity for political analysis was even more limited than it is today. But that boy from Buenos Aires had his sensibility. I remember my first trip from Buenos Aires to Madrid with particular clarity. It was going from modernity to the past, from color to black and white. Argentina was a cool country; Spain, an ignorant country.
Today it’s the other way around. Few countries have declined as much since the sixties as Argentina, few have advanced more than Spain. During my childhood, the Spaniards were called los galegos, usually adding the adjective brutos. This is no longer valid. Spain has transformed in record time into a modern European country, progressive in the social field, solvent in the economic field.
In terms of gay rights and women’s equality, the Spanish have not had to envy the Dutch either. Under the leadership of a world-class Economy Minister, the figures for inflation and growth are surpassing those of almost every country in the European Union, including Germany.
Today, with a week to go before the general elections, polls indicate that a sector of the Spanish population capable of deciding the winner aspires to go back in time to the era of the ignoramus in chief, Francisco Franco. The most realistic bet today seems to be that we will soon have a government coalition between Vox, the party of busy Spaniards, and the Popular Party led by the Galician Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
Vox’s devotees have not gone well with the experiment with modernity. That is why they wish to return to a Spain where theater plays with gay themes are censored (“mariconadas les minimes”, could be their slogan), where political parties that do not swear loyalty to the flag are criminalized, where everything is once again centralized power in the capital, where (remember?) young women who want to end a pregnancy will have to travel to London to have an abortion.
In 2013, after fifteen years in Spain, I went, precisely, to London. But always with the intention of returning. More proud of my Spanish half than my British half, I used to tell my English friends that not only was life better in Spain, but that in politics it was the only country in Europe where the extreme right did not paint nothing. The recent experience of Francoism, he explained to them with didactic solemnity, had frightened that ghost.
The English extreme right pushed for Brexit and I decided to return to Spanish civilization. Soon my eyes opened. I saw the enormity of the gap between Spaniards as social beings and as political beings. So nice, noble and generous in their day-to-day life, when they set foot on political ground there were too many of them who went crazy.
Let’s see, for example, the response of the Popular Party and its loyalists to the outbreak of Catalan independence. More obsessed with being right (“by my ass!”) than finding a solution, they screamed and insulted and resorted to their medieval sedition law to put people in prison and create martyrs and make many Catalans who had been at peace with the Crown they discovered a previously unknown vein of nationalism.
Spain made a fool of itself in the eyes of the rest of Europe. It began to be muttered in the capitals of the continent that perhaps the neighbor to the south was not as modern as had been thought. But Pedro Sánchez came to power at the head of the Socialist Party and the course was straightened. Instead of another ignoramus, Mariano Rajoy, at the meetings in Brussels, the president of the Spanish Government represented Spain abroad without complexes. Instead of throwing gasoline on the independent fire, Sánchez threw cold water on it. Soft rhetoric, pardons for prisoners, end of sedition law. Catalonia calmed down: one less problem for the central government.
But the calm in politics, the calm management, does not suit many millions of Spaniards, it seems. They love to enjoy that feeling of moral superiority that indignation gives them. They need raw meat and this is exactly what Vox gives them, among other things when it declares in favor of outlawing pro-independence parties, a guarantee of instability not only in Catalonia but in the Basque Country. And since the PP does not want to be left behind in displays of patriotic fervor, it proposes that if it wins the elections it will reimpose the blessed sedition law. In other words, of solutions, nothing. If to win you have to start a fire, to start a fire.
With which the gap widens today, as never in the twenty-five years since I came to live in Barcelona, ??between the sagacious Spain that knows how to live like no one else and the idiotic Spain that conceives politics as a club duel. But, but… I don’t lose hope. I have a feeling that even if a PP-Vox coalition wins the elections – a golás for the most radical independence, by the way – the trend that started after Franco’s death will end up being recovered.
Vox will not survive exposure to light, just as its counterpart on the left, Podemos, has not been able to. Podemos did well while playing opposition politics, as Vox is playing today. Both with similar styles. Masters of truth, always rabid, eternally claiming moral preeminence. Pablo Iglesias, the most visible figure of Podemos since its eruption a decade ago, is another caricature of the impregnated Espanyol, different only because he comes from the left. But Podemos entered into a coalition with the Sánchez Government and betrayed its immaturity. It was seen that his priority was not so much the happiness of the proletariat as the unhappiness of the bourgeoisie, to which half of Spain belongs and half of Spain aspires to belong. And now, goodbye.
The sudden popularity of the extremes represented by Podemos and Vox are the consequence, I think, of a certain complacency on the part of the Spanish electorate. Democracy is no longer in danger, it has been thought, it is no longer young and fragile, and now from maturity we can give ourselves the luxury of being frivolous. Vox is a frivolity and an anachronism at this moment in Spanish history. We may have to put up with them for a while longer, even in the government, but not long from now we will say, I think, that it represented the last death spasm of the Francoist beast.
