This text belongs to ‘Penínsulas’, the newsletter that Enric Juliana sends every Tuesday. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
The Peninsulas newsletter returns and the first thing we have to do is review the political map left by the general elections of July 23, the last major electoral call that has taken place in the European Union.
There is still no clear parliamentary majority. The formula for the governorship of the next four years is not yet resolved. Spain today is a peninsula surrounded by political uncertainties on all sides, except one, called the isthmus, which contains a single certainty: the Popular Party and Vox do not have enough seats to be able to govern.
That is the only indisputable truth of July 23. The alliance of the traditional right with the extreme right has failed in Spain, at least for the moment. The Weber-Meloni plan to expand the alliances of the European People’s Party towards the extreme right has suffered a severe setback in Spain after having recently come to fruition in several European countries, with special intensity in Italy and the great Scandinavian peninsula.
The first installment of Peninsulas, on April 18, referred to those winds that came from the north. At the end of this summer, the far-right governs alone or in coalition in the following EU countries: Poland, Hungary, Italy, Finland, the Czech Republic and Latvia and offers parliamentary support to the Swedish conservative government.
More data for that cartography. The National Front could today be the most voted party in France, while the ultra Alternative for Germany formation appears as the second force in the polls. The CDU, the traditional German conservative party, Angela Merkel’s party, today in opposition, resists establishing pacts with the extreme right. His Bavarian friends from the CSU, a group to which Manfred Weber, current president of the EPP, belongs, are beginning to see him differently.
A local ally of the Bavarian CSU, a Christian social formation that has governed the richest state in Germany for more than sixty years, without interruption, has just been denounced for advocating Nazism in his youth. The person questioned has refused to resign and the Bavarian president, Markus Söder, leader of the CSU, has confirmed him in his position. There will soon be elections in Bavaria (October 8), Poland (October 15) and the Netherlands (November 22). They will be three very interesting tests. This is the map and the calendar. Both explain to us how important the recent electoral results in Spain have been.
The Weber-Meloni plan for Spain has failed, he told them. What does the Italian prime minister have to do with this story? We have told it repeatedly in La Vanguardia. Meloni was very interested in the entry of Vox into the Government of Spain in order to pave the understanding between her formation, the Brothers of Italy (heirs of the Italian Social Movement, a party of those nostalgic for fascism founded in 1946) with the European People’s Party. The Italian prime minister wants to obtain European credentials and influence the formation of a new conservative bloc on a continental scale that would try to marginalize the social democrats in the configuration of the new European Commission.
We are talking about the negotiations that will come after the renewal of the European Parliament in June 2024, elections whose importance we will not tire of underlining in the coming months. We are talking about the future of the European institutional architecture. Since the creation of the Commission of the European Communities in 1966, this architecture has been based on the pact between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, now open to liberals. However, the Christian democracy of the 1960s has practically ceased to exist. Since Silvio Berlusconi’s entry into the European People’s Party at the end of the nineties, his mutation has been constant. Today he is a great container for conservative forces of different traditions, which seeks an agreement with the extreme right to expand its perimeter.
Manfred Weber has suffered the blow of the recent Spanish elections. In a recent interview with Corriere della Sera he reiterates his praise for Meloni, but corrects the shot. He now defends that the understanding between popular, social democrats and liberals must continue to be the operational basis of the EU. Tomorrow, Wednesday, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will deliver her final State of the Union speech before the European elections in June. Weber does not love Von der Leyen, let’s stay with this fact.
Europe. This is the crux of the matter. This continues to be the main axis of the complex Spanish political situation. The FAES Foundation, the main laboratory of ideas of the Spanish right, to which we must always pay attention, begins the course today talking about Europe.
“The political interim in Spain can benefit Russia.” This is the analysis of the situation from one of the few newspapers that maintain a high level of influence in the United States, The Washington Post, the newspaper that publicized the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. A film essay. A decade ago, the Post was acquired by American billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. After closing the purchase operation, Bezos publicly promised not to interfere in the newspaper’s editorial line.
In a long editorial about Spain, published on August 31, the North American newspaper has warned that a long period of political interim in Spain could strategically benefit Russia, which has long been interested in the destabilization of the European Union. The Washington Post has not called on the two major Spanish parties to close ranks, but it has recalled that the Catalan independence movement maintained some type of connection with Russia in the past. These contacts existed, although they did not go beyond second-rate figures who ventured to look for interlocutors in Moscow as a trial. Our newspaper reported it. The judicial investigations opened in this regard were closed without specific accusations. You will remember the fable of the ten thousand Russian soldiers who could land in Catalonia if independence were proclaimed. The Federal Security Service (FSB), reincarnation of the KGB, mocked them
The Post does not accuse Carles Puigdemont of working for Russia – there is no real evidence to support such an accusation – but it warns that an ungovernable Spain would be in Vladimir Putin’s interest. “Sánchez would do well to try to offer incentives to Catalan nationalists, barring another (illegal) referendum,” the newspaper concludes. I think this editorial should be taken into account. It is not the opinion of the United States government. It is a view from the United States. Puigdemont, eager to get out of a marginal position, has it in his power to correct perceptions that continue to weigh on him in Washington and Brussels.
