The anthropologist Ruth Cardoso wrote an essay some time ago entitled El pueblo desunido jamás será vencido. The 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 some of these may share social interests to form 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 nucleating a broad front is over. Political breadth is essential, but it does not come from a front, but from 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 the votes of Podemos, in the absence of Sumar, remained to the left. Partly because of the D’Hondt law, but even more because of the undecideds of the two formations. Let’s remember that in 2019 someone thought they would succeed in the July elections by adding the votes of Podemos and Esquerra 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 large 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 Spanish Government.
The question is even more important if we consider what is the historical block of political change in Spain, based on a strategic alliance (with tactical sequelae) between the social democracy of the Spanish State, the diversity on the left of the social democracy, and the Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalist parties, in their ideological variety. Because only a block of this magnitude, with each electorate mobilized for its own, can stably overcome an extreme right and an extreme right that sink its roots in political centralism, in stale Catholicism and in the fleshly interests of a part of the economic elite (only a part) who are more profiteers than entrepreneurs.
Castile, and in particular Madrid, are sociologically anchored to the right. Not so the country as a whole. And from the so-called periphery, the majority in fact, the shoots of a 21st century European country are emerging that will once and for all conjure up the demons that we were never able to fully exorcise.
