Rufián's idea

You can have whatever opinion you want about Gabriel Rufián and his public persona, but the idea he has been insisting on lately (the formation of a left-wing front that can run in the general elections as a single, unified force to confront the far right) is based on a couple of observations he must have had the opportunity to make in his time on the political scene.

First observation: the hate speech broadcast by the nationalist right and far right is not mere bravado, nor bait to gain an audience and votes. It is genuine hate, with penetration and influence among both certain power elites and broad segments of the population, and is therefore likely to translate into real political and social action in the not-too-distant future. They don't just bark to stir up trouble: they bark with conviction. The hate is not merely rhetorical: it is real.

The second observation is that this hatred is directed against all those whom the right and far right perceive as opposed to their worldview (or at least their view of Spain). Who are these opponents? A whole host: immigrants, feminists, Catalan separatists, Basque separatists, NGOs, pro-Palestinian activists, climate change scientists, epidemiologists, people from Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, and Valencia who speak Catalan, environmentalists, transgender people, LGBTQ+ organizations, left-wing pacifists, celebrities, public school teachers in particular, and defenders of public services in general. I list them in no particular order because the hatred of these right-wing groups toward all these people is also chaotic. From their point of view, they are all part of (we are all part of, you and I too) the wokeA particularly perverse form of groupthink that, according to the right wing, hijacks—through indoctrination and a subtle combination of slogans, lies, and half-truths—people's minds and their individual freedom. woke destroys the West, the woke destroys Spain. Consequently, the woke He deserves to be stopped, defeated, crushed, because he is a dictatorship.

While the situations are not entirely comparable, we are not far removed from the accusations and tensions that the right and far-right nationalists stirred up against the Republican government just before the Civil War. The global environment favors them, accompanies them, and provides them with models to emulate: among Spain's current self-proclaimed saviors are many admirers of Trump in the US and of ICE's executions of activists in broad daylight. They claim they were terrorists. Is a left-wing front, as Rufián suggests, the way to confront all this? It's impossible to know, because it's never been done, but it would certainly be a way to gather strength. Coordinating and leading these forces is another matter entirely, given that many of those hated despise each other, each wants to appear the most hated and persecuted, and everyone prefers to be the head of the herring rather than the tail of the scallop.