29-N: the strategy of renunciations

One of the risks of politics is the extreme oscillation between tactics and the empty promise of maximums, leaving the essential space, the decisive space of strategy, neglected. This neglected space is the most necessary one for being able to propose solid, viable, and sustained solutions over time. We live, however, and we are all aware of it, caught on a pendulum that is pushed not by the tangential force of gravity but by the decibels of shouts and insults.

The legislature that began in July 2023 has been the greatest exponent of this perverse and dizzying oscillation. Caught on the pendulum, we have collided on issues such as international conflicts, inflation, amnesty, housing, migration, and the effects of climate change. And now the electoral contest of 29-N will be fought without limits in verbal aggression. Tactical maneuvering, emptiness, populism, and verbal virulence are not the best coordinates for the great debates that Catalan society and the rest of Spain need.

Politics has a great capacity for transformation that we dream will be constructive or corrective, but it can also be destructive and hurtful. In the last three years, in the so-called advanced world, we have seen shattered democracies where there were once social benchmarks. The statement that says that politics, the more reviled it is, the more necessary it becomes, has once again become a reality.

In a stark manner, economic power has poured money into a populism that calls into question the very foundations of democracy. Without shame, they boast of a most dangerous supremacism, which leads them to make dehumanizing statements, of rejection and ill-will towards economic immigration. It is a supremacism that they apply to everything that does not align with their uniformist will –in their own image–, and above all, with their interests. Economic power has managed to make the nostalgia for dictatorial periods fashionable, because they are not capable of understanding and behaving respectfully with diversity.

The far-right has always been here, among us, but now it has managed to become fashionable. They have gained momentum and, all over the planet, they are trying to hurt democracies and divide societies. In Catalonia, we have the double version that has always existed in our political framework: the one that denies the Catalan nation and the one that appropriates it. In this open-air growth, they have contributed to the loss of legitimacy of democratic institutions, to the shattering of respectful coexistence. To sow doubts about the political institutions they do not yet control.

If the expansion and harshness of the international ultra-right has been surprising, the lamentable tendency of the left to split and separate has not, a tradition that goes back a long way. With the narcissism of small differences, suspicions, and personal phobias, trapped in aperformance revolutionary, and confusing the time of politics and the time of history, they will lose the opportunity to establish electoral strategies that respond to the democratic emergency we are going through.

And here is a proposal in this regard. If it is true that they want to stop the arrival of Vox to power, the minority left-wing parties must withdraw candidacies in constituencies with fewer than 7 deputies during the last week of the campaign and allow, even if they have major disagreements, the Socialist Party to act as a dike. To give everyone an idea, these constituencies are 35 out of a total of 52, and they account for 144 deputies, 41% of the chamber. Counting that some will fall to the side of the right, it is necessary to ensure that a minimum will not. The Broad Front and the PSOE have reached some electoral agreements for the Senate; for the Congress, it will be necessary to make decisions on withdrawing candidacies without possibilities of obtaining representation: it must be specified. Because when the neo-fascists are in power, passionate speeches will be of no use, nor will laments or lessons in oratory be worth anything, if beforehand we have not been capable of engineering electoral renunciation so that no left-wing vote is wasted.

Liberals and social democrats would have the possibility to block the way for the ultras and thus deflate, with a synchronous improvement of public services, the bubble of the party of hate and dehumanization, which in these elections is personified by Vox. But, in my opinion, the Spanish social democrats do not have a solid project for a federal and multinational Spain, and as for the so-called liberals, they succumbed to the siren songs of the extreme right a long time ago, surely since Aznar tasted an absolute majority.

The PP and the sectors it represents cannot conceive of being out of government, because the Spanish right remained trapped in the idea that the natural order of things consists of those who defend the interests of the powerful having to rule and the common people having to obey. That is why no government of left-wing parties will have the recognition of a right that has not known how to distance itself from the ultras. The traditional right has been invalidated to stop the neo-fascist wave, and its proximity in programs makes it the main ally and responsible for this regressive wave.

Left-wing votes are valuable because they are scarce, and it is not clear that they are enough to prevent the rise of the extreme right. For this reason, this electoral period we will have to know every last letter of the electoral law and perform micro-strategy constituency by constituency. If the PP-Vox alliance reaches power, there will be no excuse or consolation, no matter how much some may believe that fighting against neo-fascism once it is installed in power will make it more epic.

The far-right uses arrogance, bravado, verbal aggression, and the excitement of young people who believe they are discovering a favorable order without knowing that their ancestors already lived through similar things. This staging cannot make us forget that the real goal is to end the protection of rights.

We will have two tasks: one, not to fall into the mud and to highlight the lies of the ultra discourse; the other, to stop being dazzled by the spectacle of the dance of names and to demand that, when necessary, there be brave withdrawals, constituency by constituency, that make possible the containment wall that the extreme right fears so much.