The anthropologist Ruth Cardoso wrote an essay some time ago entitled The disunited people will never be defeated. Its meaning is deep. Because societies as diverse and complex as ours, traversed by communication flows from multiple sources, can hardly have unified political aggregations around homogeneous ideologies or worldviews. Although social interests can be shared among several of them to constitute a political majority. The universe of parties founded on a programmatic ideology belongs to the past and, probably, to an imaginary that never existed.
That is why the programs sway in the wind of public opinion. This does not diminish the importance of organizations formed around a collective project. But these organizations cannot articulate a majority because none can accommodate the social and cultural diversity of society. The vanguard party bringing together a broad front is over. Political breadth is essential, but it does not go head-to-head, but rather through confluences and coalitions.
This analysis is applicable to the current Spanish left. In general terms, the Podemos and Sumar projects are different. The municipal and regional elections showed that Podemos’s votes, in the absence of Sumar, subtracted from the left. Partly because of the D’Hondt law but even more because of the undecided members of the two parties. Let us remember that in 2019, someone believed they would triumph in the July elections by adding the votes of Podemos and Izquierda Unida in advance. In the end, they remained.
Another issue is the tactical need for electoral alliances encouraged by an electoral law tailored to the great majorities and the interests of rural Spain. But in politics, the mobilization of each electorate is as important as the preference of a segment of the population. Therefore, the organic separation between Podemos and Sumar, followed by negotiations for electoral coalitions, is the most profitable, safeguarding the stability of the Government.
The question is even more important if we consider what is the historical bloc of political change in Spain, based on a strategic alliance (with tactical consequences) between the social democracy of the Spanish State, the diversity to the left of social democracy, and the Catalan nationalist parties , Basques and Galicians, in their ideological variety. Because only a bloc of this size, with each electorate mobilized for its own sake, can stably overcome an extreme right and an extreme right that have their roots in political centralism, in rancid Catholicism and in the stark interests of a part of the economic elite (only a part) who are more rent-seeking than entrepreneurial.
Castilla, and in particular Madrid, are sociologically anchored in the right. Not so for the country as a whole. And from that so-called periphery, the majority in fact, the sprouts of a 21st century European country are emerging that once and for all conjure up the demons that we were never able to completely exorcise.
