[D66] Social democrats pave way for return of right-wing Popular Party in Spain

[Antid Oto]

Social democrats pave way for return of right-wing Popular Party in Spain
By Paul Mitchell
22 November 2011

With the count complete, the right-wing Popular Party (PP) won 186 seats in
Spain’s 350-seat Congress in Sunday’s election compared with 154 in the last
parliament. With an absolute majority, the PP will be able to pass legislation
without recourse to smaller parties and control all the organs of state,
including the courts.

The PP won 44.6 percent of the vote compared to the outgoing Socialist Workers
Party’s (PSOE) 28.7 percent. The vote for the social democrats slumped by five
million and the number of seats held by the PSOE plunged from 169 to 110, in its
worst performance ever.

The PP was able to capitalise on the social disaster brought about by the global
financial crisis and the austerity measures imposed by the PSOE, aided and
abetted by the ex-left groups and trade unions that supported it in government.
The outcome of the elections is a serious warning to the working class.

In 2004, the PP was driven from office, with the PSOE under José Luis Rodríguez
Zapatero securing 42 percent of the vote in a historically high turnout of 77.2
percent. The PSOE received 10.9 million votes—the highest number of votes of any
party ever—and the PP’s vote dropped by 700,000. The vote in particular
reflected massive popular opposition to the war in Iraq, which then-PP leader
José Maria Aznar supported by sending Spanish troops to back the US occupation.

But the PSOE was the undeserving beneficiary of the anti-PP sentiment, and was
to cruelly betray the mandate for fundamental political and social change.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it has imposed savage spending
cuts, including a 15-billion-euro austerity package, wage cuts of 15 percent and
attacks on pensions. This is under conditions of widespread hardship and
unemployment levels close to five million, or 21.52 percent of the workforce and
50 percent among 18-to-25-year-olds.

This even enabled the PP to pose as an opponent of cuts, if only by remaining
silent about its own intentions.

Even so, Spain remains a social powder keg. Much of the world’s press crowed
that the vote represented a swing to the right. In fact, the PP only increased
its vote from 10.2 million to 10.8 million votes. Nearly 10 million voters, over
28 percent, abstained. The swing to the PP was for the most part due to the
collapse of the PSOE vote from 11.1 million in 2008 to 6.9 million.

This shift also benefited the pseudo-left parties such as the United Left, which
saw its number of seats increase from two in 2008 to 11. The new Basque
coalition Amaiur went from zero to seven seats in Congress and now outnumbers
the region’s traditional Basque Nationalist Party, which only won five seats.

For the new government to meet the public deficit target of 4.4 percent of gross
domestic product by the end of 2012—the PSOE failed to meet the 6 percent for
this year—it will have to slash spending by 30 billion euros ($41 billion),
twice as much as the PSOE, at a time when the economy is sinking deeper into
recession.

Fearful that Spain faces a crisis of revolutionary proportions, new PP Prime
Minister Mariano Rajoy called for Spaniards of all political persuasions to work
together.

“It is no secret to anyone that we are going to rule in the most delicate
circumstances Spain has faced in 30 years,” he said. “We stand before one of
those crossroads that will determine the future of our country, not just in the
next few years but for decades.”

He combined this with an appeal for the financial markets to realise “that there
are elections and that the winners must be given a little room for manoeuvre
that should last more than half an hour.”

There were, he added, “no miraculous cures to solve Spain’s economic troubles.”
He must act, while seeking to avoid creating “artificial division.”

But the global financial oligarchy interpreted Rajoy’s appeals, even though they
come from the major party of the ruling elite—the political heirs of the
dictator General Francisco Franco—as a sign of weakness.

The PP’s domestic political calculations do not count for much to the global
banks, which have been behind the installation of unelected technocratic
governments in Greece and Italy.

The common demand of the “financial markets” is for the new government to grit
its teeth and immediately impose greater austerity measures, further slashing
living standards, “reforming” employment protection laws and destroying what
remains of the welfare state.

To underline their diktat, on Monday interest rates on the country’s 10-year
bond rose by 12 basis points to 6.56 percent. These are far above Germany’s
rates of 1.88 percent and close to the 7 percent levels that prompted Greece,
Ireland and Portugal to request huge bailouts from the European Union and the
International Monetary Fund earlier this year. Madrid’s Ibex stock exchange
dropped nearly two percent in early trading.

Spain is now considered to be less creditworthy than Italy, where former
European Union commissioner Mario Monti has been installed as prime minister.
Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform, declared
contemptuously, “Little is known about him [Rajoy] outside Spain… He reminds me
of Zapatero. If it is going to be that way, Spain will continue to lose influence.”

A Madrid-based bond trader told Reuters, “They [the PP] still haven’t done
anything so it makes sense there’s no support from the market. It’s good they’ve
won a majority, but the global economy remains in a bad way, and this won’t
change one day to another… The problem remains. There are no clients. There is
no interest. Maybe the ECB [European Central Bank] is buying bonds, but it’s the
only one that is.”

Another said, “Rajoy says he can rebuild market confidence in Spain but his
arrival isn’t enough and he hasn’t said anything ‘magical’ tonight. The crisis
is moving too fast; in this environment bond markets might not extend him credit
while we wait.”

The vice chairman of Spain’s largest employers’ organisation the Spanish
Confederation of Business Organizations Arturo Fernández said the bond rates
were not “sustainable” and the country was on the “edge of an abyss.”

Whatever their concerns regarding the political and social stability of Spain,
Rajoy’s government will do as it is told. Spanish workers face a brutal
offensive that will make the pain inflicted on them to date pale in comparison.

Rajoy’s appeal for national unity is a fraud. Whatever time and leeway the PP is
given will be used only in order to mobilise its supporters in big business and
the upper layers of the petty-bourgeoisie, including the pro-Falangist elements
on the party’s periphery, as an effective force against the working class.

Workers and youth must articulate their own response to the collapse of the PSOE
and put an end to the ability of the bourgeoisie to dictate the political and
social agenda.

This means building a new and genuinely socialist party.

Such a party must be free from the grip of the trade union bureaucracy that has
spent the past years propping up the PSOE and sabotaging the fight for jobs and
living standards, and which will perform the same service for the PP.

It must be based upon a programme for the reorganisation of economic life to
meet social need, not private profit, capable of uniting workers in Spain with
their class brothers and sisters across the continent on the struggle against
the capitalist institutions of the European Union and for the United Socialist
States of Europe.

This is the perspective advanced by the International Committee of the Fourth
International.

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/nov2011/spai-n22.shtml