If Vox was a bear, would it shit in the woods?

Hey, have you heard the big news? It seems that Spain now has an extreme right. Big surprise, huh? Sure. About the same as writing a headline that says “Scientists discover that bears now shit in the woods”.

Yet this week, certain international commentators have seized on the results of Sunday’s Andalusian regional elections, in which far-right party Vox appeared to come from nowhere to take 11% of votes and 12 seats, to paint a picture of a country that had succumbed to Europe’s terrible extreme-right virus after somehow avoiding it till now. Why? - they lament.

But the commentators are wrong now, as they've been wrong up till now. The truth is that the far right has always been present in Spain. In fact, the real story is not those 11% of votes for Vox, but rather that the other two right-wing parties, the Partido Popular (PP) and Ciudadanos (Cs), who attracted 47% of the vote between them, are treating the emergence of the ultra party Vox so routinely that they are now rubbing their hands with glee and getting ready to form a happy three-way right-wing government – in which the key to power will be held by a political group which is vehemently anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-Catalan, anti-women and so centralist that it wants to abolish the very regional parliament it has just been elected to. Never mind all this, say the PP and Cs leaders, what's more important is that "the people want change". Vale. Change, they shall get.

So the real "why?", the real question mark, hangs over the nature of the Spanish right as a whole. And the response to this starts from the obvious difference between the post-1945 history of the rest of western Europe, and that of Spain: unlike almost all its close neighbours, Spain was governed by a fascist autocracy until the late 1970s. In other words, the far right was in power. For forty years it was ruled by a dictatorship that had taken control through the most violent means possible - a military coup that mutated into a three year civil war - and slaughtered its civilian opponents wholesale as well as prohibiting all opposing ideas. By the 1970s, though looking for a way to modernise, this regime was also thoroughly entrenched in society, and following Franco’s death, the price of its voluntary acceptance of a new democratic constitution was on the one hand, a "law of amnesia" so that the many crimes committed under fascism wouldn’t be investigated, and on the other, a fairly complete continuity of people and institutions (military, justice, public bodies, big business, culture etc). So the fascists were able to substantially maintain their places of power in society, but they just had to stop being fascists. Or at least, say they had stopped. Wink, wink, say no more.

It is this that is the special dynamic of the far right in Spain’s recent politics. It is this that has confused people: when fascist parties were sprouting all across Europe, why could no evidence of significant support for any extreme right party be found in Spain? Simply because in Spain, the PP, the Spanish party of the right, of the old establishment, was actually founded by the fascists themselves, and the huge number of people who have maintained their faith in Francoist ideals to a greater or lesser degree have also been maintained inside the PP loop. All they had to do was stick to the rules.

I would venture that those rules could be described as follows: rule number one, if you want to become part of the official political structures, you do have to more or less pay lip service to the constitutional regime constructed in 1978. But rule number two would be: if you're still a fascist at heart, and yearn for the old days (people that many Spanish media label as "nostalgics" instead of calling them what they are, open fascists), or you're more modern but have still been strongly socialised into the unreal right-wing vision of a homogeneous, traditionalist, centralised Spain - then no problem, you may not be political candidate material, but you'll still be able to remain very much in the circles of power – you might be able to do well in business, in law, in the police or military, in the media and cultural establishments, and so on. You’ll have friends (and if that sounds like a recipe for corruption, well, bingo. Welcome to the PP).

And there's also a rule number three - the most important of all in the long run: the constitutional structures of the democratic regime are so frozen solid and difficult to change, that as long as the right follows rules 1 and 2, its continued control of the country's institutions can be practically guaranteed.

So what has happened lately? In Spain, the limits and failings of the transition to democracy have gradually become more and more evident. Rather than diminishing over time they have grown. The emergence of the Catalan independence movement was in a large part a result of the failure of those frozen constitutional institutions to cope with Catalan aspirations for greater autonomy within the system. In turn, the response to the Catalan situation was also partly due to the underlying, unspoken Spanish acceptance of the old Francoist rules: so, the Spanish government refused to discuss the issue politically, then eventually when things got out of its control, it turned to state violence, and politicisation of the courts. And that has further damaged those institutions. And so it’s hardly surprising that the old rules of decorum about keeping the far right under wraps have broken down. Why bother hiding one’s support for violent repression of opponents when the government itself did it so openly on October 1st last year? When the king then backed it up in a televised speech two days later?

Of course, as long as the right was in power – as it was in the 2017 crisis – then the right wing parties themselves still had to pay lip service to the norms of polite constitutional society, even while heads were being bashed by police and peaceful leaders charged with violent rebellion. The PP had to pretend to be responsible, and Cs as its right wing ally, also. But when the Socialist PSOE, despite its own ideological confusion, managed rather surprisingly to expel the PP from power after a massive corruption case ruling, the gloves came fully off.

Since then both PP and Cs have been competing openly for the hard right vote, with rhetoric that is strongly pro-Spanish nationalism, anti Catalan and Basque, anti immigration: we hear that Spanish imperial genocide was in reality a civilising influence, that Catalans are people who want to destroy Spain, that Basques are potential terrorists, and that immigrants are not people you want living next door to you. Perhaps without even giving that much consideration to the presence of an exclusively far-right party, the mainstream right parties were occupying and giving credibility to the political patch of turf away, away out to the right.

On the other hand, the Socialist party had been affected inversely by its change of role: having itself previously fanned the flames of anti-Catalanism when this suited its electoral needs in opposition, it now found itself constrained in its rhetoric by its government role, and in particular, because it needed Catalan independence parliamentary support to stay in power.

From there it is easy to see what happened to allow Vox to pick up 11% of the vote in the Andalusian elections. The huge number of Andalusian voters who had long since bought the basic lines of the Spanish nationalist thesis on Catalonia were presented with three parties all essentially trying to make the same anti Catalan argument: PP, Cs and Vox. A proportion of them looked at Vox, and said, why bother with the imitators when you can have the real thing? And so Vox comes into a parliament occupying the balance of power with a platform that is anti-Catalan, anti-LGBTi, anti-immigrant, sexist, radically centralist and pro-Spanish nationalist. Voters who had given the Socialist party its Andalusian majorities in past years were confused or just not motivated and stayed home (turnout was only 57%, 6% down on last election).

And the interesting thing is that in the days ahead you will likely be able to see the extent to which this vision of the Spanish far right makes sense. How? Because in most countries, when a far right party with vile policies has entered parliament, there has been a clear and general adherence to the policy of creating a “sanitary cordon” around it – refusing to make deals with it and thus to dignify its policies with credibility. In Andalusia, the defeated Socialist leader Susana Díaz has called for such a cordon. But the role of the electoral dice has produced a situation where the only way the two established parties of the right can form a government, is though the support of the 12 Vox MPs. And they’re going to do it. No thoughts of creating, for example, a German style “grand coalition” between the major left and right wing parties (PSOE and PP) to keep out the fascists. No. The PP and Cs recognize Vox as one of their own kind. And they shall govern together. And bears have always shat in the woods.