The upcoming Spanish elections indicate the unthinkable – the resurrection of Franco’s influence within a new government. But perhaps it could be the last of his death throes.
When I was five years old and lived in Argentina, my capacity for political analysis was even more limited than today. But that little boy from Buenos Aires had his sensitivities. I remember my first trip from Buenos Aires to Madrid with special clarity. It was going from modernity to the past, from colour to black and white.
Today it is the other way around. Few countries have declined more since the sixties than Argentina, and few have advanced more than Spain. During my childhood, Spaniards were called “Rough Galicians” the equivalent of “Bogans” or “Newfies.” That is no longer valid. The Bogans are the Argentinians who have plunged a country that had absolutely everything into misery. Spain, where I live now, became a modern European country in record time, socially progressive and economically solvent.
But today, one week before the general elections, the surveys indicate that a sector of the Spanish population, large enough to decide the winner, actually aspires to go back in time to the Franco era. The most realistic bet seems to be that we will soon have a coalition government between the far-Right Vox, the party of “pissed-off Spaniards,” and the Centre-right establishment Popular Party.
The experiment in modernity did not sit well with Vox devotees. That is why they want to return to a Spain in which plays with gay themes are censored, in which political parties that do not swear allegiance to the flag are criminalised, in which young women who want to end a pregnancy would have to travel to London to have an abortion.
In 2013, after 15 years in Spain, I actually went to live in London. But always with the intention of returning. Prouder of my Spanish half than my British half, I used to tell my English friends that not only was life better in Spain, but also that in politics it was the only country in Europe where the extreme Right had no grip on the place. The recent experience of Franco, I explained to them with didactic solemnity, had scared away that ghost.
The English extreme Right promoted Brexit, and I decided to return to Spanish civilisation. After a while, my eyes opened. I saw the enormity of the gap between the Spanish as social beings and as political beings. So nice, noble and generous on a day-to-day basis, when they put their feet in political terrain too many go ballistic. Could this be one of the legacies of Spanish colonialism to Latin America? In Argentina it seems so. I have travelled a lot, but I don’t know more endearing people than Argentinians, who feel a deeper loyalty towards their friends. But in politics, as in Spain, hatred spreads. There are no rivals, there are only enemies.
I look at the Spanish electoral campaign and think of Goya’s painting with the title Duelo a garrotazos (Fight with Cudgels). Two men facing each other, with their legs anchored to the ground, ready to beat each other to death. Painted in 1820, it portrays the Spain of today. And, I dare say, today’s Argentina as well.
Let’s have a look at the response to the outbreak of Catalan independence of Spain’s Popular Party and its faithful, when they were in power between 2011 and 2018. More obsessed with being right (“over my dead body!”) than coming up with a solution, they yelled and insulted and resorted to a medieval “sedition” law to put people in prison and create martyrs. Many Catalans who had been at peace with the Spanish Crown discovered a previously unknown vein of nationalism.
Spain made a fool of itself in the eyes of the rest of Europe. They began to murmur in the capitals of the continent that perhaps the southern neighbour was not as modern as had been thought. But Pedro Sánchez came to power at the head of the Socialist Party and the course was straightened. Instead of pouring petrol on the independence fire, Sánchez poured cold water. Mild rhetoric, pardons for prisoners and an end to the sedition law. Catalonia calmed down – one less problem for the central government.
But it seems that peace in politics, and cool management, is not going well for many millions of Spaniards. They prefer to enjoy that feeling of moral superiority that indignation gives them. They need raw flesh and that is exactly what Vox gives them, among other things when it declares itself in favour of outlawing the pro-independence parties, a guarantee of violence not only in Catalonia but in the Basque Country. In the Popular Party there are several leaders who propose the same thing. In other words, they offer no solutions, nothing. They have to set fire and burn everything to win.
The gap is widening today as never before since Franco’s death between the shrewd Spain that knows how to live like no one else and the idiot Spain that thinks of politics as a fight with cudgels. But I do not lose hope. I would like to believe that Vox will not survive exposure to light, just as its counterpart on the radical Left, Podemos, (the “We Can Party”) has not. Podemos did well while playing politics in opposition, as Vox plays today. Both with similar styles. Owners of the truth, and always rabid.
Pablo Iglesias, a comrade of the Kirchners in Argentina, the most visible figure of Podemos, is yet another caricature of the angry Spaniard, different only because he comes from the Left. But Podemos entered into coalition with the Sanchez government, betrayed its immaturity, and today it has almost disappeared. It was obvious that its priority was not so much the happiness of the proletariat as the unhappiness of the bourgeoisie, to which half of Spain belongs and to which the other half hopes to belong. Doesn’t it remind you of Argentina?
Vox, the party that gets all the attention in the Spanish electoral campaign, is an anachronism at this point in history. We may have to put up with them for a while longer, even in government, but in no time, we will say, I think, that they represented the last death throes of the Franco beast.
I am not so sure about Argentina. Trapped in the neuroses of the past, it seems that it will have the death rattles for a long time.
This column appeared in Clarín, Argentina, 15 July 2023, and is translated by Kieran Tapsell
John Carlin is a journalist, author and columnist for both English and Spanish language newspapers.
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