Counterpunch, Topic: Lessons for the Left From the Spanish Elections

By -
Excerpt:
"On one level the Andalucian elections do look like Germany, where the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfG) took 94 seats in the Bundestag, and Italy, where the rightwing, xenophobic Northern League is sharing power with the center-right Five Star Movement.
There are certainly parallels to both countries, but there are also major differences that are uniquely Spanish.
What is similar is the anger at the conventional center-right and center-left parties that have enforced a decade of misery on their populations. Center-left parties like the Democratic Party in Italy and the Social Democratic Party in Germany bought into the failed strategy of neo-liberalism that called for austerity, regressive taxes, privatization of public resources and painful cutbacks in social services as a strategy for getting out of debt. Not only was it hard for most people to see a difference between the center-left and the center-right, many times the parties governed jointly, as they did in Germany. Andalucía’s Socialists were in an alliance with Ciudadanos.
However, the rise of parties like Vox and the AfG has less to do with a surge from the right than as a collapse of the center-right and center-left. The Spanish Socialists did badly, but so did the right-wing Popular Party. In Germany, both the center-right and the center-left took a beating.
In the aftermath of the Andalucian debacle, Susana Diaz, leader of the PSOE in Andalucía, called for a “firewall” against the right. But Diaz helped blow a hole in that “firewall” in the first place with politics that alienated much of the Socialist’s long-time constituency. In 2016 Diaz led a rightist coup in the PSOE that dethroned General Secretary Pedro Sanchez because he was trying to cobble together a coalition with the Leftist Podemos Party, the Basques, and Catalan separatists.
After ousting Sanchez, Diaz allowed Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to form a government and pass an austerity budget. Making common cause with the PP was apparently too much for the SPOE’s rank and file, and they returned Sanchez to his old post seven months later. The Socialist rank and file also seems to have sat on their hands in the Andalucian election. Only 58.6 percent of the electorate turned out and there were a considerable number of abstentions and blank ballots in traditionally Socialist strongholds.
The leftist AA took a hit as well, but that was in part due to some infighting in Podemos, and the Party did not mobilize significant forces on the ground. And because Podemos kept its distance from the crisis in Catalonia, it ceded the issue of separatism to the right, particularly Ciudadanos, which wrapped itself in the Spanish flag.
Podemos actually has a principled position on Catalan independence: it opposes it, but thinks the matter should be up to the Catalans. It also supports greater cultural and economic autonomy for Spain’s richest province. But when Rajoy unleashed the police on the October 2017 independence referendum, beating voters and arresting Catalan leaders, Podemos merely condemned the violence. The Socialists supported Rajoy, although they too expressed discomfort with the actions of the police...."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Deforestation Process

By -
Image
  The Deforestation Process Deforestation is too often reduced to what’s most conspicuous. But deforestation is complex and a lot more than raising beef cattle or growing soybeans. To begin with, despite all the biodiversity especially of plant life, rain forest soil isn’t very fertile. Nope, it’s actually very oxalic. Oxalic soils are acidic. Acidic soils are full of iron, bauxite and other minerals.  So not only are trees in the forest chopped down for their precious hardwood, the soils these trees grow in are mined for minerals including aluminum, zinc, copper, manganese, gold and iron. Do you know where the aluminum in your water bottle came from? What’s one of most electricity intensive things to do? Convert bauxite into aluminum. It’s an electrostatic process to remove oxygen from the alumina (Al2O3). This electricity is also one of the largest costs of producing aluminum. So that’s why hydroelectricity is often used to reduce the costs of refining bauxite to alumina to ...
Read more

The Deep State vs The Deep Country

By -
Image
  The Deep State vs The Deep Country I need to begin with the obvious: in spite of all the deep state, propaganda and “deep empire” (transnational) resources being used to declare that “Biden” (i.e. Harris) has won, as of right now nobody knows who got most votes and where. I would even suggest that we will never really find out who won, because who won depends on a large number of local laws and regulations and because it will probably never be possible to separate the fake votes from the legal ones. Finally, neither side will ever gracefully admit to having lost the contest. So now the country will enter a profound crisis. That is the bad news. But there is also very good news. First, it has now become clear to the entire planet that the US “democracy” is anything but: the USA is an  oligarchic plutocracy , plagued with a myriad of antiquated laws and corrupt to the bone. The special “trick” of this US oligarchic plutocracy is that is masquerades as an ochlocracy: there is *...
Read more

The Deep Politics of Jared Leto’s Cult

By -
Image
The Deep Politics of Jared Leto’s Cult Posted on  September 15, 2019 …Pop singer—he’s not so much a person as a puppet, whose strings are pulled for a scheme of total nightmare! …A terrifying and withering exposé of the misuse of power in an age of illusion! — Privilege  theatrical trailer,  1967 For the past year, I’ve been working hard on a book project, which is going to offer insight into a lot of the bigger contemporary political trends. One of the main threads is this: many of the political conflicts we see are the result of internecine struggles between ruling class-power blocs, and many of these are the result of Silicon Valley taking its place among the monopoly industries. In order to illustrate the concept of deep politics, one chapter discusses conclusions we can draw from two of the best on the subject:  Crypto Cuttlefish  and  Dave McGowan . One of the first things to say about the value of their respective research i...
Read more