by Rob Marchant
It would be easy for Labour to derive some trite answers from the result of Sunday’s general election in Spain, where many international commentators were holding their breath.
In the end, wily PM Pedro Sánchez managed to frustrate the advance of the far right – which almost got back into government for the first time in half a century – and may well end up continuing to run the country after all. Hurrah, a victory for Western social democracy.
The quick and comfortable answer for Labour to take away is this: in the end, given a stark choice in times of hardship, people saw through right-wing populism and agreed that the left are the good guys, who will look after their needs. The needs of the many won over needs of the few. The left is on its way back.
Sadly, this is not the right lesson.
Sanchez has, a little like Joe Biden, managed both to do some good things, and meanwhile seriously irritate many electors in the political centre who would otherwise vote for him. The radical end of the global left, spearheaded by the likes of the Democrats’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is starting to drive us all a little crazy.
Spain, which has enjoyed a leftist government for the last five years, is little different. The uncomfortable truth is that the Spanish leader has, and only maybe, clung on by the skin of his teeth, when he could potentially have won a comfortable second term. Being a smart political operator, he gambled that most Spaniards would recoil so much at the thought of neofascists in government, that he could avert disaster, and therefore brought forward the election five months in a “back me or sack me” move. He turned out to have made a smartish bet.
But not only may that trick not work next time, one also has to ask why he ended up in such dire straits that he had to resort to it in the first place– that so many voters disliked the Socialists so much, that they could come that close to putting Franco’s unpleasant heirs into government in their place. The best Sánchez can hope for now is an unstable, rainbow coalition, in hock to the demands of nationalist parties.
