ending 14 March 2004
SOCIALIST DEFEATISM IN SPAIN
Tonight Spain’s Socialist Party claimed victory in the general elections with 43 per cent of the vote counted as against the Popular Party’s 36 per cent. The turnout, of course, was high, following popular revulsion at the slaughter of around two hundred Spaniards in railway bombings centred on Madrid on Thursday.
The bombing was peculiarly misconceived, if as claimed, a protest against Spanish support for the invasion of Iraq last year. Spain saw the largest demonstrations against the war in Europe, making it more than likely that anti-war protestors would be among the dead.
Millions protested around Spain at the action, suggesting to many that the right-wing Populists would ride the outrage back to victory – but the character of the protests suggested otherwise. The vigils were not the kind of patriotic reaction against Arabs one might have expected in the past (though that sentiment was represented). In many ways they were a continuation of the ‘anti-war’ protests of last year. The underlying message ‘paz’ expressing a desire to withdraw from a dangerous international engagement.
Under cover of ‘suspending’ party political campaigning on the eve of an election, the government hoped to turn popular fear into votes. And more recently the Popular Party had restored some standing after an economic revival. Last year, though, the WEEK reported that anti-war ‘protestors may still claim the scalp of one European leader, Aznar of Spain, whose moral support for the Coalition was unpopular with ninety per cent of the population’ (6 April 2003).
The weakness in the government’s strategy was revealed, though, in its attempt to pin the blame on the Basque regional lobbyists of Eta, whose low-level campaign of assassinations and bombings continues to provoke Spanish conservatives. Despite signing up for US President Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ retiring Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar grasped that his party could not gain by heightened panic over Al Qaeda. Instead the government got the blame for provoking the terrorists into targeting Spain.
Signs that the wheels were coming of the Populist Party’s bandwagon were clear on Saturday night when the vigils gave way to protests outside their headquarters. Conspiracy theories abounded, with the government being accused of hiding the evidence of Al Qaeda culpability.
The Socialist victory comes with a perverse message. During the world wars of the Twentieth Century, Communists developed the strategy of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ – meaning that they worked for the defeat of their own ruling classes, the better to sweep them aside in favour of a new order.
The peace movement in Spain – and the vigils are a continuation – is a defeatist movement. It wants Spain to withdraw from involvement in Iraq. It sees the railway bombings as the price paid for supporting the war.
But it has no positive alternative to the ruling elite. It only wants Spain to keep its head down, and play safe. The underlying sentiment is one of withdrawal from political life in favour of security. The right’s vision of a security state aimed at dragooning the public into action. The left’s alternative is to withdraw into the stockade. Pinning the blame on Al Qaeda is important because it means sustaining the illusion that terror is a problem foreign to Spain.
The vigils succeeded in galvanising a high turnout as a rebuff to the attack on democracy. But in other ways the election showed that terror did indeed succeed in de-politicising the election. The predominant attitude expressed was one that wants to shelter from a violent world.