The lefts? Well, thank God

In view of the upcoming general elections, there has been unusual interest and coverage regarding the possibility of building a unitary candidacy for the left that exists beyond the PSOE. In all autonomous communities, to the left of the socialists there is a political space that is more or less large, quite consolidated, which the PSOE candidacies cannot aspire to occupy, even though the real programmatic differences are not, at this moment, excessively large. It is a matter of origin and political culture, of different emphases, as well as of more moderate forms in some cases and more radical ones in others. The left that comes from the culture of democratic communism, of Carrillo, López Raimundo, and Berlinguer, for us to understand each other, has its own scope, especially when a new left coming from social mobilizations and new concerns has joined it. Deep down, the approaches are social democratic like those of the PSOE, although a bit more demanding when it comes to proposing social and economic transformations. Both social democratic offers are needed to be able to govern in Spain, also in Catalonia. They coexist and there is much more that they share than what confronts them.

For the November 29 elections, this left of the left, which is very plural, has managed to gather under a new banner, that of the Broad Front, formed by more than a dozen organizations, some of them very strong in their territories. Despite this agreement, essential to have any possibility of continuing with a progressive government, I see that the media headlines and headlines again that the attempt at unity has been a "failure," because Podemos is not there and because it is not led by Gabriel Rufián. It is splitting hairs to say that it is a failure when a dozen left-wing forces reach an agreement, but one that is extra-parliamentary and of dubious location on the left side remains outside, as was quite foreseeable. Let us remember that Pablo Iglesias's followers had 5 deputies in Congress, which later became 4 and who had been elected within the Sumar lists, before they quickly split from them. And that the scarce fifteen deputies they total in all the regional Parliaments were obtained in coalition, and in places like Catalonia, only the name remains, with almost no representation or militants. Podemos, let us remember, was not born as a left-wing movement, but with the pretension of overcoming these political locations and their cultures. Their approach is explicitly a child of the populism that, in Latin America, was promoted by theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who, by mixing concepts from Gramsci, but also from the reactionary Carl Schmitt, propose the establishment of political movements based on the friend-enemy, people-caste, top-bottom duality... They come to form a new space that does not fit with the culture of the left. In Spain, a handful of political scientists from the Complutense University, trained around Jorge Vestrynge, who, for those who do not remember, had been secretary general of Manuel Fraga's Popular Alliance, from whom he maintained, after his epiphany, a sharp authoritarian and reactionary sense, appropriated the 15-M movement. The political influences of Iglesias and his followers are completed by the recognized mentorship of the worst of Julio Anguita, a communist leader who advocated and practiced a pincer movement between Izquierda Unida and the Popular Party in order to end socialist governments.

The intention of the hard core of Podemos has always been to reset the Spanish political system, denying any value to the Transition and to progressive governments. Their clear bet is to facilitate, as soon as possible, for the right and the far-right to occupy power, to plunge the socialists and the entire left into crisis and, in this context, for them to emerge as the savior populism against the elites. They have not been interested in unity or converging with a political culture that is not their own. They have put on a show to wear down a left that, in reality, they have turned into their enemies. The Broad Front also knew this, but had to row until the last minute because their social and political base demanded it of them. It is not a wasted shot in the foot, it is a well-crafted political narrative. Years ago, those who did this, fostering defeat while feigning belonging, were called fifth columnists. By the way, Gabriel Rufián has played the same role; it seems incredible that anyone could believe he would abandon ERC to lead a movement that was clearly never going to happen. He has managed to get many covers and photographs and ended up appearing as "the desired one," when, in fact, it was an episode of distraction. ERC, pragmatic independence movement and progressivism outside the socialist tradition, has little to do with the political space of the Broad Front or Podemos; one can always resort to the slogan of “the little house and the little garden” by Francesc Macià to illustrate it. Therefore, the “failure” of the left only exists for those who find it useful to brandish it. Both in Spain and in Catalonia, the offer of the lefts of socialist tradition is well delimited into two: the majority social-democratic space here and there, and an “alternative” left, also functionally social-democratic, with more demanding forms. Different spaces and groups that converge on objectives. Where is the division and the “failure”?