When I was five years old and I lived in Argentina, my capacity for political analysis was even more limited than today. But that little boy from Buenos Aires had his sensibility. I remember my first trip from Buenos Aires to Madrid with special clarity. It was going from modernity to the past, from color to black and white. Argentina was a cool country; Spain, a redneck country.
Today it is the other way around. Few countries have declined more since the sixties than Argentina, few have advanced more than Spain. During my childhood, the Spanish were called los gallegos, usually adding the adjective brutes. That is no longer valid. Spain has transformed in record time into a modern European country, socially progressive, economically solvent.
Regarding the rights of homosexuals and the equality of women, the Spanish have not had to envy the Dutch. Under the leadership of a world-class finance minister, the numbers for inflation and growth are outpacing those of almost every country in the European Union, Germany included.
Today, one week before the general elections, surveys indicate that a sector of the Spanish population capable of deciding the winner aspires to return in time to the time of the redneck 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 angry Spaniards, and the Popular Party led by the Galician Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
Vox devotees have not been happy with the experiment with modernity. That is why they want to return to a Spain in which gay-themed plays are censored (“minimal fagots”, could be their slogan), in which political parties that do not swear allegiance to the flag are criminalized, in which all power is once again centralized 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 of my British half, I would 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 had nothing to do with it. The recent experience of Francoism, he explained to them with didactic solemnity, had scared away that ghost.
The English extreme right promoted Brexit and I decided to return to Spanish civilization. After a while my eyes opened. I saw the enormity of the gap between the Spanish as social beings and as political beings. So nice, noble and generous on a day-to-day basis, when they put their feet in political terrain too many went crazy.
Let’s see, for example, the response of the Popular Party and its faithful to the outbreak of Catalan independence. More obsessed with being right (“by my balls!”) than finding a solution, they yelled and insulted and resorted to their medieval sedition law to put people in prison and create martyrs and make many Catalans who had been in peace with the Crown discovered a previously unknown vein of nationalism.
Spain made a fool of itself in the eyes of the rest of Europe. It began to murmur 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 redneck, Mariano Rajoy, at the meetings in Brussels, the President of the Spanish Government represented Spain abroad without complexes. Instead of adding gasoline to the independent fire, Sánchez added cold water. Mild rhetoric, pardons for prisoners, end of sedition law. Catalonia calmed down: one less problem for the central government.
But the calm in politics, the serene management, is not going well for many millions of Spaniards, it seems. They prefer to enjoy that feeling of moral superiority that indignation gives them. They need raw meat, and that is exactly what Vox gives them, among other things, when it declares itself in favor of outlawing the pro-independence parties, a guarantee of instability not only in Catalonia but also 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 re-impose the blessed law of sedition. In other words, solutions, nothing. If to win you have to set fire, set fire.
With which the gap widens today, as never before in the twenty-five years since I came to live in Barcelona, ??between the shrewd Spain that knows how to live like no one else and the idiot Spain that conceives of politics as a duel with clubs. But, but… I don’t lose hope. I have a feeling that even if a PP-Vox coalition wins the elections – a great goal for the most radical independence movement, by the way – the trend that began 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. Podemos did well while playing politics in the opposition, as Vox plays today. Both with similar styles. Owners of the truth, always rabid, eternally claiming moral pre-eminence. Pablo Iglesias, Podemos’ most visible figure since its eruption a decade ago, is yet another caricature of the pissed-off Spaniard, different only because he hails from the left. But Podemos entered into a coalition with the Sánchez government and revealed his immaturity. It was seen that their 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 that Podemos and Vox represent is the consequence, I believe, of a certain complacency that has possessed 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 afford to be frivolous. Vox is frivolous and an anachronism at this point in Spanish history. Perhaps we will have to put up with them for a while longer, even in government, but before long we will say, I think, that it represented the last death spasm of the Francoist beast.
