If I had been in Madrid last week, I would have doubtless lined up, with tens of thousands of madrileños, to pay my respects to Adolfo Suárez, the first elected prime minister of post-Francoist Spain, who died on March 23 at the age of 81.
An up-and-coming bureaucrat in Franco's regime, Suárez recognised, upon the dictator's death, that things would now be able to change. He also recognised that they had to. After being parachuted into the prime ministership by King Juan Carlos in 1976, he quickly announced that elections would be forthcoming: "The point of departure," he told parliament that year, "is the recognition of pluralism in our society. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring it."
As one of the key architects of Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy over the ensuing five years, overseeing a series of far-reaching economic and political reforms, including the adoption of a new constitution, as well as delicate process of conciliation with opposition groups, including the Communist Party, which had long been banned, Suárez's record warrants the show of respect his death has prompted. (Famously, when Colonel Antonio Tejero led a coup against the government in 1981, Suárez, having only recently resigned from the prime ministership, was one of only three parliamentarians who refused lie on the floor as ordered.)
It is sometimes easy to forget the fact that Spain is only a relatively new democracy. Until one travels around the country at length, it can be difficult to fully appreciate just how forcefully the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing years of fascist rule are still felt across the peninsula, let alone how contested that legacy occasionally is. One doesn't need to go looking for the signs. They're right there in the street. Two months ago, I came across a small but vocal protest on Madrid's Puerta del Sol, in which a number of aging Spaniards, with placards and candles, urged passers-by to always remember what happened to Franco's victims. On the other hand, is not uncommon to encounter nostalgia for the dictatorship, either. In Málaga, I had a discussion with a friend about the fact that many Spaniards, hurting as a resulting of the country's financial crisis, look back wistfully on the days when the country pulled itself out of its messes rather than kowtowed to the dictates of the continent. "They talk about a time when you could be proud of being Spanish," my friend said. (I am currently in Navarra, with its sizable Basque population, where nostalgia for fascism, part or present, is very thin on the ground. Bombing Guernica back into the Stone Age didn't exactly win over the people up here.)
Such nostalgia—for Francoist Spain, Kemalist Turkey, Soviet Russia and so on—is always a little bit disconcerting. Which is why it was cheering to watch so many people lining up to pay their respects to Spain's first democratically-elected prime minister last week. Last Tuesday, more than thirty thousand lined the streets to witness a funeral procession down Madrid's Paseo del Prado to Plaza de Cibeles, organisers having been prompted to extend the route after crowd numbers exceeded their expectations. (As an aside, I can't help but note how much better democracies are at this sort of thing. People filed past Suárez's closed coffin, not his corpse, and that coffin was buried later in the afternoon rather than left on show in some brutalist mausoleum. America's greatest presidents, Jefferson and Lincoln, would almost certainly consider the monuments to them in Washington, DC a bit too much, but they'd have been pleased with their treatment next to that of, say, Vladimir Lenin, who wished to be buried in St Petersburg next to his mother and whose body is still on show in Moscow today despite regular, rather heated discussions about whether or not to remove it.)
What was comparatively less cheering was the near-total absence of young people in those same respectful lines. Less cheering, but not at all surprising. The day before Suárez died, tens of thousands of anti-austerity protesters took to the Paseo del Prado themselves, marching against tax increases and budget cuts. Clashes broke out, as they almost always do, between certain of the protesters and police. On Thursday, while I was writing this piece in Pamplona's Plaza de Castillo, hundreds of young people marched by protesting against cuts to public education before they, too, were forced to flee after police were sent to disperse them. (There were upturned bins and broken glass all throughout the city centre that evening.) Why mourn the country's first democratically-elected president? The feeling among many of the country's protesters—not all of them young, by any means—is that they've been mourning democracy itself for quite some time now.
I recently had lunch with Pablo Gallego García, one of the founding members of Los Indignados, the non-systemic opposition movement, primarily consisting of young people, that both preceded and to some extent inspired the Occupy movement in the United States. Our wide-ranging discussion touched numerous times upon what he sees as the shrinking policy gap between Spain's two major parties and the erosion of popular sovereignty in the face of unelected EU decision-makers.
"You have to understand that there is no real difference between the major parties here," García told me. "There is no real choice between the two. The PP [the conservative People's Party] and the PSOE [the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers' Party] disagree on various superficial issues while agreeing entirely about the ones that really matter. They turn our elections into referendums on individual rights or abortion or whatever in order to ensure that issues like banking, foreclosures and unemployment are conveniently forgotten."
"There's never any discussion about political reforms, such as open lists, senate reform, referendums and direct democracy. There's no talk about cracking down on tax havens, forcing multinationals to pay their taxes, raising the minimum wage or setting a maximum one."
"And there's certainly no discussion about political corruption," he said. He recounted a joke that has become popular here in recent years. "These days, whenever a politician walks into a bar, unless he was sworn in that morning everyone will assume he's corrupt," he said. "If he was sworn in that morning, only three quarters of them will assume it."
Such sentiments are not confined to the fringe, but are rather increasingly mainstream. Every month, Madrid's Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas conducts a national poll in which respondents are asked to list what they consider to be the country's three most pressing problems. Corruption and fraud have been mentioned by no fewer than 30 per cent of respondents in every poll since February last year and in three of those polls it was mentioned by no fewer than 40 per cent of them. ("When people see the country's former presidents living like kings," my friend in Málaga told me, "they say, 'At least Franco didn't abscond with our money and die as a multi-millionaire!'") You have to go back to May 2012 to find a poll in which politics in general were mentioned by less than a fifth of respondents. Indeed, politics and politicians are often mentioned by more than a quarter of them.
In Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, Peter Mair argued that the European Union has "clearly played a major role in the hollowing out of policy competition between political parties at the national level" and that its "growing weight [...] helps to foster domestic democratic deficits".
This has happened in two ways. First, and most obviously, one major effect of Europe is to limit the policy space that is available to the political parties. [...] Second, Europe limits the capacities of national governments, and hence also the capacities of the parties in those governments, by reducing the range of policy instruments at their disposal... [Italics in the original.]
The externalisation of policy decisions to unelected technocrats—regardless of the content or political bent of those decisions—has the effect of transforming Europe's various national governments into what Mair refers to as "branch offices" of Brussels, decreasing their efficacy, representativeness and therefore legitimacy in the eyes of voters. This is certainly what is has happened in Spain since the PP, under Mariano Rajoy, was elected in 2011.
"When there was virtually no sunlight between the PSOE and the PP when it came to the Constitutional Reform of 2011," García told me, "the major parties proved that they don't serve their supposed constituencies but the Troika [the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission]. The Troika is the only constituency that either party cares about and it believes that paying interest on the country's debt is greater priority than ensuring the health of the welfare state."
As these comments suggest, García has little time for the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats who staff the "head office", either. Indeed, while euroscepticism is commonly considered a defining trait of the continent's far-right parties, the disillusionment of many on the left, albeit for entirely different reasons, means that an increasingly broad-based "opposition of principal against the polity", as Mair called it, is gradually taking shape. A number of the groups that comprise this opposition will seek election in the European Parliament elections scheduled for May, the crazier among them with the publically-expressed intention of derailing the European project from the inside. But the EU's most democratic and representative institution is also its least influential. "While the European Parliament sits around discussing agriculture," García said, "the European Commission sits around deciding how to save the financial system with our taxes, wages and welfare."
While embracing democracy after decades of dictatorship helped to bring Spain—as well as Greece, Portugal and others—back into the European fold, remaining in it has, perversely, required them to relinquish more and more popular sovereignty. And the social consequences—rampant unemployment, political instability, the rise of neo-fascist groups in various polities—suggest that the trade-off hasn't especially been worth it. But the Troika, fanatical in its belief in austerity, will pursue its policies until it has been. Or kill the countries in question trying.
This is not merely a tragedy for the southern European countries hardest-hit by the financial crisis. It's a tragedy for Europe as a whole, too. The European project was designed specifically to ensure that the horrors of WWII would never again be visited upon the continent. In pursuit of that noble but rather too specific goal, the cause for which the war was fought has seemingly been forgotten: to ensure, as Lincoln put it in another context, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth". Precisely that seems to be perishing from Europe in favour of government of the people, for the banks, by the technocratic elite. And now those who truly believed in democracy, bringing it to countries long subjected to its opposite, seem, sadly, but perhaps appropriately, to perishing from it, too.
Matthew Clayfield is a freelance foreign correspondent currently working in Spain. In 2012, he covered the Greek parliamentary elections in Athens and anti-austerity protests in Madrid.
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