29-N: how do you eat an elephant?

In France, since it was coined twenty years ago by socialist senator Robert Badinter, the expression “lepenization of spirits” has become popular as a way to designate the progressive diffusion of the ideas, themes, and vocabulary of the National Front—the organization founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and other former collaborators with the Nazis, today renamed as National Rally—within society, the media, and other political parties. The expression underscores the idea that, even without the need for the far-right to be a majority at the polls, its main themes (such as immigration, insecurity, or criticism of the European Union) end up influencing public debate and being normalized by the traditional political class.

This is also what has happened in Spain as a whole, where social unrest, unlike other not-so-distant historical moments, seems to be channeled, at least in part, toward far-right options. The fact is that, while still a minority option (particularly in Catalonia, where Vox has not gone beyond 8% of the vote in the last general and regional elections), the far-right conditions the agenda of public debate, which is also assumed by forces of the more conventional right (PP and Junts) that previously held more nuanced positions regarding issues such as immigration.

The explanations for the increase in extreme right-wing movements around the world must necessarily be of a diverse nature, because it is a complex phenomenon: the Vox voter from Pedralbes is not the same as the one from Torre Baró, to name two neighborhoods in Barcelona where the ultra group achieves its best results. Nor is the Vox voter the same as the Aliança Catalana voter, forces that the media have contributed to fattening without us knowing exactly why (despite their undeniable rise in the polls). But it is evident that there is, everywhere, a common characteristic among the electorate that opts for ultra forces: they are sectors that feel marginalized from general well-being, abandoned by traditional parties (social democrats and Christian democrats in the European case), and that express their lack of confidence in the future, and their distrust of politics, through a clearly negative, protest vote, which elevates –without their lack of credibility seeming to matter to them– politicians who are characterized by their unbridled demagoguery, their manifest ignorance and, often, their intrinsic immorality, in addition to a nefarious ideology. Social networks play a determining role in this drift, having become, from an initial promise of an instrument for the democratization of citizen participation, into fabulous tools for mass control and manipulation. Disinformation is what is doing so much damage to democracy, a system that can only function on the basis of an educated and informed citizenry.

What can we do in the face of this? In America, a book has just been published whose title, How to eat an elephant, refers to a proverbial phrase, “How do you eat an elephant?”, the answer to which is “A bite at a time”(“One bite at a time”), and which in the case of the book transforms into “One voter at a time”. The author, a consultant named Sarah Longwell, is a former member of the Republican Party, who fought Trump for having appropriated it (in the title, the author plays with the fact that the elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party). In a recent radio interview, Longwell stated that the electorate votes for a politician for their ability to identify the problems that concern people, and not so much for their campaign promises. Thus, she said, what was fundamental in the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York were not the concrete proposals (freezing rents, free daycare, or raising taxes on the wealthiest), which we will see how he will be able to implement, but the fact of having identified the basic issue: making New York an affordable city for its citizens.

Ultimately, the rise of the far right—which can be successfully countered from the left: Paris, Berlin, and New York, but not Madrid, are clear examples—has to do with the discredit of traditional politics, a discredit born of its manifest inability to subject the economy to the common good. We have the rawest and clearest expression of this in the housing crisis that, these days, is at the center of all discussions. The question is obvious, then: will the issue of affordable housing be the trump card that the Spanish left has found to eat the elephant? The answer, on November 29th. Go vote.