At the same time, it is true that Italy has been somewhat strange for a long time. The country’s blending of uninterrupted Christian Democratic pre-eminence, with mass communism as the force of the moment, between the 1950s and 1980s, has long made its politics special. These two pillars collapsed in the early 1990s, with the Christian Democratic Party succumbing to the Tangentopoli (“Bribery”) corruption scandal and the Italian Communist Party at the end of the Soviet Union.
The vacuum created by this double collapse, in which Berlusconi plunged, was unusual. The ebb of Italian politics in the following years has a character of its own, although some elements have been imitated to varying degrees elsewhere. This is how a country with a very specific policy has also become an indicator.
The political history on the opposite coast of the western Mediterranean is very different. In 1994, the year Berlusconi first came to power, Felipe González’s Spanish prime minister turned 12. Where Italian politics was feverish, turbulent and hybrid, Spanish politics was stable, bipartisan and much closer to the Western European norm.
Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 followed an immediate shift to a democratic style that resembled the Federal Republic of Germany: a highly decentralized state governed politically through a traditional center-right party and a traditional center-left party. In Spain, they were respectively the Popular Party (PP) and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). (PSOE, 2004-2011), then Mariano Rajoy (PP, 2011-2018), then Pedro Sánchez (PSOE, 2018-present).
However, those stable swings in Spain’s political pendulum reflect the deeper adjustments in the country’s politics over the past decade. The eurozone crisis and its aftermath hit Spain hard and fragmented its politics, transforming the predominantly two-party order into a five-party order in which the PSOE and PP also had to take on Podemos (socialist), Ciudadanos (center-right) and Vox (far-right).
Economic turmoil also coincided with, and most likely contributed to, a rise in Catalan secessionism, further complicating the picture. All this has made Spain more typical of the broader European trends of recent decades than Italy: a traditional two-party system in the solid and fragmented past, recently marked by cultural polarization.
Pedro Sánchez, the outgoing Spanish Prime Minister, is a product of this environment. A former Madrid councillor, he came to force in 2018 when Rajoy of the PP lost a no-confidence vote over a corruption scandal. the socialist Unidas Podemos, which was born out of anti-austerity protests at the beginning of the decade and formed an electoral pact with an older left-wing party in 2016.
The resulting government has been strangely enduring and shocking. He passed progressive laws, adding innovations to abortion and transgender rights, and regulations that move immigrants from the black market to legal employment. It also made Spain the first country in Europe to grant female staff the right to take time off in case of severe menstrual pain.
Internationally, Sánchez has been Spain’s most influential prime minister since González, turning his country into a vital “swing state” in Europe: a bridge between France and Germany, south and north, and between west and east.
Despite a Covid-19 recession that has specifically affected Spain (given the collapse of the tourism industry due to the pandemic), its economy is now expected to grow faster this year than those of France, Germany or Italy. Its exports reached a record point in 2022; Its inflation rate is among the lowest in the euro area. In a rating of the economic performance of 34 rich countries by The Economist last year, Spain came in fourth.
That may not be enough to keep Sanchez in place after Spain’s July 23 general election. The collapse of the young center-right Ciudadanos party has benefited the PP, which has been led since April 2022 by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, a horny and mediocre conservative who advocates cautious conservatism. tilting Unidas Podemos in an attempt to maximise the radical left’s share of seats.
The economic control of the government of the day has been intelligent in those circumstances, but times remain difficult. Unemployment in Spain is at its lowest point in 15 years, but it is still at 12. 7%. The PP defeated the PSOE in the regional and municipal elections on May 28. the New Statesman went to press, the polls were shrinking.
But the country’s transition from two-party stability to its current fragmented political landscape is just one example of its broader European exemplarity. The way this will play out, in at least five ways, will include the next chapters of the continent’s politics to some extent. It is an election that makes Spain, not Italy, the ultimate harbinger of Europe’s political future.
[See also: Britain is the liberal nation of Europe]
That the divide between the dominant right and the far right is crumbling in the European political landscape is not new. But Spain stands out, at least among the continent’s leading states, for the speed with which this has happened. Vox was founded only in 2013, but within a decade it has a coalition spouse in one of the country’s tough regional governments.
Vox had subsidized a PP management in the southern region of Andalusia since 2019 and, in March, officially formed a coalition with the PP in Castilla y León, a region north of Madrid. This would likely prove to be a style for a Feijóo (PP) government dependent, or even officially included, on the far-right party, which campaigns against feminism and immigration and in favour of hunting, bullfighting, a hard and heavily militarised border with Morocco to the south and conservative cultural values.
The most striking thing about such a government would be its composition – the new governments of Italy and Sweden, as well as the existing administrations in Poland and Hungary, would make it the norm and the exception – but the few waves it would create in Europe. The Spanish government would be an indicator of its composition, but for the lack of hindsight it has received.
Cooperation with the right made Austrian conservative leader Wolfgang Schüssel address EU economic sanctions in 2000. But a pact led by Feijóo with Vox would create few ripples in Brussels today, and the new president of the Spanish government would have an open door.
The rise of the far right in European politics in recent years seems unlikely to be reversed: the social changes, transformations and unrest brought about by the climate crisis (including new migratory pressures) are likely to erase its base. But the election of Spain and its consequences will give us the most productive vision yet of a Europe in which this truth is fully taken into account.
[See also: Old Europe is dead]
Any replacement on the Spanish left after the next election may also foreshadow what will happen elsewhere. In 1982, González of the PSOE won his first election with 48% of the vote. Even in 1996, when he finally lost power, he had fallen to just 38%. However, Sanchez, his penultimate successor as Spanish prime minister, never got more than 29%.
Even in the unlikely event that Sánchez maintains his strength after the election, he is unlikely to overcome this result. Its strength of permanence will count on the Sumar-Podemos pact and the functionality of the small autonomous parties of Catalonia and the Basque Country, in which it has relied for its strength and legislative viability.
Here, too, Spain embodies a broader European truth: center-left governments can exist as a coalition (formal or not) between the radical left, the social democratic center-left, and the liberal center. When those forces are divided, those governments are virtually lost. Aligning them is fiendishly difficult. But when they unite, they have the ideological wind in their sails.
Sánchez’s pro-investment agenda, both in the EU and in Spain itself, is one with the monumental shift of the US. The U. S. government is moving toward Joe Biden’s interventionist trade policy. Economically, at least, the Western mainstream is moving modestly to the left. In European political systems, such adjustments require coalitions of giant tents to make progress.
Sanchez became Spanish prime minister shortly after Catalonia’s technically illegal independence referendum in 2017. The country he inherited from Rajoy in 2018 was still scarred by the trauma of that moment, which would find new expression in the draconian condemnation of pro-secession Catalan leaders the following year, sparking a new wave of pro-independence protests.
However, Sánchez has since managed to calm the situation by replacing the PP’s antagonistic strategy with a more tolerant strategy towards Catalan secessionists, pardoning nine leaders jailed for the failed independence attempt and reforming the replaced sedition law under which they were charged. Thanks in part to this more Madrid-friendly strategy, because Catalonia’s independence has plummeted.
This case also makes today’s Spain a harbinger of Europe’s future. There is no doubt that identity politics will become more vital in an era of increasing social media use and social polarization. The question is how politicians react. Many are tempted to exploit this polarization for a simple gain.
Although far from perfect, Sanchez opted for the beautiful path of concrete progress rather than the low path of rancor and the department of the intestines. This may not be enough to secure his re-election on July 23, but it speaks of a contest that will mark European politics for decades to come.
[Read also: Austerity is about to return to Europe]
Spain’s birth rate has fallen year-on-year since 2016, from 408,734 births in that same year to 336,823 in 2021. In a country with a developing number of immigrants and a society still, despite the rise of Vox, open to immigration, this is remarkable and an indication of the demographic healing that has accompanied the eurozone crisis.
The result is a geographically giant country, the largest in Western Europe after France, with an urban population highly concentrated in several dense agglomerations (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville) and void strips. If you take one of the country’s AVE high-speed trains, which depart from Madrid in the Iberian centre, to or near one of the main coastal cities, you see dry plains and aged, empty villages passing through the window, a stark reminder of this reality.
It is a truth that has taken political shape in recent years with that of Vox, which, in addition to classic far-right concerns such as immigration and Europe, is manipulating messages pleasing to the rural electorate who feel their interests and way of life have been neglected. behind
The empty Spain of today is the empty Europe of tomorrow. As the continent ages, the depopulation of European peoples will be a major social priority. The labor shortage will be more acute and will require more pragmatic conversations about immigration. It will be more difficult to locate and inspire farmers who need to be true guardians of an increasingly lonely field.
What increasingly unites the urban Spain of the big towns commissioned by Sánchez with the empty Spain of the uprising of Vox and Teruel Hay is the visceral delight of a climate in conversion. Last year was the record year in Spain and the third driest, a record that, judging by the heat wave that exists in the country (with temperatures reaching 44°C in June), could be broken in 2023.
Rainfall levels have dropped, the frequency of wildfires has increased and droughts are increasing for Vox in southern regions where the fight for water has become more intense.
In Andalusia, the PP suggested to the region’s government, dependent on Vox’s votes, to legalize the pumping of water from the Doñana wetlands in the Guadalquivir River delta, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Sánchez and his allies in Madrid strongly oppose this decision. The dispute has escalated in Brussels, with conservatives in the European Parliament accusing the European Commission of interfering in Spain’s election campaign by siding with the minister of wetland protection.
These new divisions over the pressures of the climate crisis and how to respond to them are evident in Europe. Take, for example, the Dutch provincial elections in March, in which the motion of right-wing agrarian peasant citizens overtook Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s liberals, thanks to a surge in rural opposition to his new limits on agricultural nitrogen emissions.
The Netherlands is also vulnerable to climate change due to its exposure to emerging sea levels. However, Spain’s joy with maximum temperatures makes the country more likely to enjoy extreme weather changes earlier than much of the continent. According to current trends, cities like Seville and Madrid will soon be uninhabitable during the summer months.
New pressures will oppose the vain but seductive politics of identity to the sober and concrete politics of surrender. Cities and towns, in ageing rural areas, will empty out and see their shrinking youth populations move to cities.
The climate crisis can also upset the continent’s political order, strengthening the populists and greens of our time and the new politicians of the empty Europe of the future.
And yet, Spain also has notable assets. The largest cities in the country are colorful and artistic like few others. Their society is permissive, but retains a deep and affectionate sense of tradition. The country has married liberal modernity with networking and belonging more effectively than many other policies.
The ageing of the Spanish population is also a reflection of its health; Life expectancy is expected to surpass that of Japan until 2040 and be the highest in the world. And in recent years, Spain has also developed a new influential voice in European and foreign affairs.
The question is whether the country can cope with its demanding situations by retaining those assets for years to come. Silvio Berlusconi was waiting for our European present. For better or worse, Pedro Sánchez and his struggles will prejudge the continent’s long journey.
This article originally published on July 12, was reproduced ahead of the 2023 Spanish general election on Sunday, July 23.
[See also: Organization of the remnants of labor]
This article appeared in the July 12, 2023 edition of The New Statesman, Tabloid Nation.