David Attewell: An Anti-Austerity Popular Front in Spain?

For years, the European left has looked to a Podemos victory in the 2015 Spanish general elections as its best chance to mount a challenge to the dominant austerity regime. The EU establishment clearly agreed: both their dire warnings of “political contagion” and the impossibly punitive austerity plan imposed on the Syriza government in Greece attest to their desire to send a chilling message to the Spanish electorate about the price of electing the wrong government.

The December 20th general elections were enough to topple the Conservative PP government, but without delivering a clear victory for Podemos or the traditional center-left PSOE. Echoing the recent Portuguese elections, these mixed results signal the death of the two-party system, but without the emergence of a clear, stable alternative. This new fragmented party system currently struggling into existence is one which the relationship between social democratic parties and the emergent populist left will take center stage.

An Election Without (Clear) Winners

 In the heady days of June, Podemos was riding high in the polls. It looked set to translate a wave of voter anger into a first place showing in the elections; failing that, Podemos’ more realistic goal was to beat the Social Democrats (PSOE) into second place. Such a win would have two major consequences: first, Podemos would become the official opposition, and second, PSOE would be forced into an impossible strategic dilemma: either support a Podemos government as a junior partner, or forfeit all credibility on the left by joining a grand coalition with the PP to keep the populists out. While Podemos’ election results remain impressive for a party which didn’t exist two years ago, it failed to meet these benchmarks. It was narrowly edged out by the PSOE, which despite its worst result ever, achieved 22% of the vote and 90 seats.

Spanish Election Results (176 seats needed for a majority)

The result is eerily similar to the recent Portuguese elections. In both Portugal and Spain, EU officials hailed a return to growth as vindication for austerity policies and backed incumbent Conservative governments to finish the job. Yet headline GDP numbers failed to grasp the weak foundations on which their “recoveries” have been built, with the overwhelming majority of new jobs being temporary, often poorly paid and without benefits. Young Spanish workers earn less in real terms than they did in 1990, and often less than their parents did when they entered the labor market decades earlier. The resulting wave of voter dissatisfaction has thus unseated ruling parties, leaving them with a plurality but without the ability to form governing majorities.

In Portugal, the opposition Socialists’ inability to unseat the Conservative incumbents was a significant failure, but the party’s center-right opponents were so badly weakened that the Socialists were able to put together a government by ignoring the warnings of the political establishment and forging an anti-austerity alliance with the Syriza-like Left Bloc, Greens, and Communists. In Spain too, the PSOE may have suffered a historically poor result, but they paradoxically remain far more likely than the first-placed Conservatives to be able to form a government. To do so, they would need to cobble together a ragtag coalition of PSOE, Podemos, the United Left and (mostly Catalan) regionalist parties.

Social Democrats: Badly Weakened, Yet on the Brink of Power?

Party systems across Western Europe are changing, as hollowed-out mainstream parties come up against rising populist challengers. In some countries like Sweden, Denmark, and France, the ascendant challengers are far right parties. But in Southern Europe, the new balance of power is defined by a much-fragmented but majoritarian left struggling against a minority center-right. The position of Social Democratic parties is a particularly paradoxical one.

On the one hand, social democrats everywhere are in deep existential crisis. Across Europe, social democratic parties which on average received around 40% of votes in the 1980s are now averaging only 28%. Young and working class voters have deserted them in droves, as the center-left has been heavily complicit in a failed agenda of austerity and neoliberal structural reforms. In most countries, social democratic parties have thus been left too weak to govern on their own, and the strongest socialist party in Europe, the French Parti Socialiste, is likely to be roundly crushed in the 2017 elections.

Yet in the face of dissatisfaction with austerity, the broader left is not doing so badly. You might be surprised to hear that despite Angela Merkel’s CDU’s dominant performance in the last Bundestag elections in 2013, the left as a whole actually achieved a numerical majority. German Social Democrats, like those elsewhere, are facing a hard truth: without working with more left-wing partners, their route to government is blocked, except as subservient junior partners to the Conservatives. Meanwhile, there is a growing recognition that grand coalitions between center-left and center-right only accelerate the defection of the social democratic base, a process now referred to as Pasokification.[1] It is in this context that PSOE has quickly ruled out any support for a PP government. The question now is to what extent they will be willing and able to follow the Portuguese Socialists’ popular front approach.

The Populist Left: A Foothold, Not a Wave

The populist Left, for its part, has also encountered the limits of its own power. In Greece, Syriza’s dramatic rise has been checked by the institutional set-up of the Eurozone, which allowed its rebellion to be asphyxiated (via liquidity withheld by the European Central Bank in the face of bank runs) and finally crushed in July. In Spain and Portugal meanwhile, the populist Left has progressed impressively, given its youth and lack of organization.

But it remains too weak to govern alone, and has so far been capable of attracting only about a fifth of the electorate, comprised of disillusioned socialists and young voters. Attempts to capture majority support by defining themselves in populist anti-establishment terms, rather than as left-wing, have fallen short in the face of red-baiting media campaigns. These forces are thus ironically left reliant on the social democrats, whose betrayals they have been born out of, in order to access power. To govern, the populist left has also been forced to moderate its demands, dropping elements like exit from the Eurozone or demands for debt cancellation. For the populists, too, such coalitions are risky: they may disillusion those looking for radical change, and sully their image as anti-establishment outsiders.

Strange Bedfellows

What may well push these forces together is a common enemy: conservatives and their unbending insistence on austerity. Yet what remains to be seen is what these alliances are actually capable of achieving within an EU institutional framework where the deck is stacked against them. In Greece, we’ve seen most dramatically that electoral power means little in the face of severe political-economic power imbalances. As the fourth largest economy in the Eurozone, Spain would clearly have more negotiating clout; a Spanish exit would mean the end of the Euro altogether. They also might enjoy an ally in Italian PM Matteo Renzi, a neoliberal social democrat (particularly on labor market policy), but one who is increasingly vocally fed up with Northern European fiscal rigor and eyeing his own party’s slide in the polls. Neither the populist Left, nor the weakened social democrats are currently strong enough to overturn austerity on their own: their future success will rest on their ability to cooperate effectively in the face of a deeply challenging institutional landscape.

The example of Portugal gives us an idea of the immediate steps that a Spanish popular front alliance might take: increases in the minimum wage, reversal of some spending cuts (particularly to pensions and public sector salaries), and other anti-poverty measures. Yet this represents a (relatively weak) attempt to treat the symptoms of the crisis, rather than its underlying drivers. One way or another, to create a real recovery the Left will have to find a way to make a more fundamental break with the status quo, involving demands for debt haircuts and economic reflation.

[1] A term for Social Democratic decline named after Pasok, the Greek social democratic party which has been virtually wiped out after consenting to austerity policies dictated by bailout memoranda.