The taboo of fascism falls
1. There are no nuances left now. One after another, the European right-wing parties are capitulating, surrendering themselves to the far-right. In Italy, the latest whim of President Giorgia Meloni, who has already been in power for four years, has been an electoral law that gifts seventy seats to whoever obtains 42% of the votes, that is to say, a bonus that minimizes pluralism. And everyone has taken it in their stride. We are in the dynamic of "anything goes".
In France, everything suggests that Marine Le Pen will be President of the Republic, unless the justice system, with whom she has pending accounts, prevents it. But polls take it for granted that if it were not her, it would be her second-in-command, Jordan Bardella. And in Spain, unless one wants to add excitement to the situation by speculating on Sánchez's capabilities to reverse trends, with the feat of having ended Felipism in his biography, everything suggests that at the end of this year we may experience a regression, with the PP and Vox governing together.
In any case, Núñez Feijóo has already taken the normalization of the far-right for granted. And it is no surprise. But what has accelerated the breaking of the taboo is that Abascal is pressuring more and more. And Feijóo has begun to feel unsettling tingles. The fact is, therefore, that we are close to elections that have every chance of bringing neo-fascism to power. And the limitations of the PP president make it even more likely. And the reality is that, whether it happens or not, the taboo has already fallen. It is already taken for granted that, if necessary, Vox will be in government and in the parliamentary majority, conditioning everything that is needed. Even manipulating fundamental rights. And the PP is fine with it. We haven't even reached that point yet and we already have two examples. Every Spanish citizen, by the mere fact of being one, has the right to vote. The PP and Vox want to prevent the grandchildren of recently naturalized exiles from voting, because they suspect –history is what it is and the Spanish right has the origins it has– that they would not vote for them. And they are not satisfied with this partisan intervention in the census. Now they are going against postal voting, with accusations of manipulation.
The lightness of the PP when it comes to recognizing the rights of others is alarming, and it is typical of those who, in complicity with the far right, walk decisively towards post-democratic authoritarianism. It is not a Spanish vice, it is a trend that blurs Western democracies. And we Catalans cannot pretend that it does not concern us. I have no doubt that if Junts manages to get out of the Puigdemont impasse and returns to being the Catalan right wing that it once was, Sílvia Orriols' Alliance will be there when they need them to make up the numbers.
2. Everything has accelerated in a short time. The taboo of the far right was a common place in European democracies, a logical inheritance of the war. In Spain, the liberation came much later, and the ghost of Francoism operated at the beginning of the Transition, conditioning the process of building the new regime on the pact to turn the page on the dictatorship. But since then the Western world has changed, as a result of the shift from industrial to financial and digital capitalism, and right-wing radicalization has spread in a disturbing way. Sometimes history has its hidden blows, and the emergence of a Trump, a symbol of this new stage, has raised some alarms in Europe, and who knows if it may end up acting as a vaccine, so that not so many people fall into the authoritarian temptation. Right now, in the United States, Trump is in free fall. But in part the damage is done. And the lifting of the taboo on fascism is worrying in Europe.
The French case is canonical. The self-destruction of Emmanuel Macron's image is textbook. It seemed he was going to take on the world and right now his figure is painted in gray. He was supposed to modernize France, take it out of the hands of the heirs of Gaullism and the socialists, and he will hand it over in the conditions for the far right to come to power and set the pace for the right that the president wanted to turn into the most liberal in Europe.
Ambitions are difficult to reconcile with reality, and at this moment it is undeniable that Europe is stuck, with liberalism and social democracy on the decline and the right-wing parties joining together without complexes to advance towards post-democratic authoritarianism. And it is curious that right now the uninhibited figure of the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, who seems alien to big companies and who has established himself as a benchmark of the Democratic Party, is being viewed with some hope. The problem is that New York is New York, it is not the United States.
