Exorcise the demons of Francoist Spain
Saturday, 25 August 2007
David Gardner
There are pictures that tell you a lot more than the thousand words they are proverbially said to be worth. Such a picture was widely reproduced this summer in Spain: of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, doing his best to shake hands with Mariano Rajoy, leader of the opposition Popular party at the entrance to the government's Moncloa palace. Mr Rajoy looks as though he cannot quite bring himself to greet the prime minister; he looks at Mr Zapatero's outstretched hand and clasps the watch on his own left hand - or perhaps he is just counting his fingers. Of course, as the newsreel reveals, they did shake hands.
But the hesitation about performing an act of common civility - think Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat on the White House lawn - is a lamentably accurate snapshot of the descent into incivility of Spanish public life: marked by factional self-indulgence that makes impossible any common view of the national interest.
The Zapatero-Rajoy summit was another failed attempt to reach a common stance on confronting Eta, the lumpen rump of Basque separatism that had just announced an end to its ceasefire. This is a question of state that the PP under Mr Rajoy - and his predecessor, José María Aznar, the former prime minister - have frequently manipulated for partisan gain.
But both the rhetoric and the ostensible substance of this polarisation go beyond the low politics of factional advantage, reviving the visceral idiom of "the two Spains" of the 1936-39 civil war.
That is in no way to suggest that anything like an armed conflict is in prospect. Merely that the traumas of that fratricidal conflagration are still bitterly in evidence - unresolved by the over-hyped transition from the Francoist dictatorship and the first democratic elections 30 years ago.
To begin with, this coarsening of politics seemed to be a story merely of bad faith, bad losers and bad blood.
In March 2004, after the horror of the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people, Spaniards summarily ejected a PP government that expected re-election and a seamless transition from Mr Aznar to Mr Rajoy. The PP has cried foul ever since, in a strident if confused attempt to impugn the legitimacy of the government (and presumably the electorate as well).
The only conspiracy that took place was the atrocity perpetrated by the mainly North African jihadis, radical Islamists influenced by al-Qaeda.
Spain's citizens did not flinch when confronted with this hyper-terrorism. On the contrary: they responded with an exemplary display of democratic conviction. First, well over 10m people poured into the streets to repudiate the bombers. Then, they turned out in equally impressive numbers to vote.
Normally, citizens rally around their government in moments of great societal stress. A majority of Spaniards did not because they were outraged at what they saw as manipulation of the tragedy by Mr Aznar and his officials, who insisted Eta was the culprit despite mounting and irrefutable evidence that jihadis did it. Presumably Mr Aznar needed to validate his hardline tactics; at the previous elections the government's inflammatory rhetoric antagonised a great many Basques but reaped a great many votes elsewhere in Spain.
The matter might have ended there. Spaniards would doubtless have judged this political petulance to be in the same category as the sour grapes of the Socialists when they lost in 1996. At that time, the Socialists deluded themselves they were victims of a rightwing press conspiracy, rather than political bankrupts in an advanced state of moral implosion after 14 years in power.
But as the recent trial of surviving train bombers demonstrated, this is not over. PP officials not only kept insisting Basque terrorists played a part; they even tried to introduce bogus evidence to prove it. There is a very different world-view here.
Under Mr Zapatero, the Socialists have been willing to negotiate the transfer of more powers to regional governments, such as the Catalans, who want the powers of taxation that the Basques already have. Spain's deep but asymmetric federalism does raise concerns, but these are mostly to do with equity: for example, the fiscal solidarity between rich and poor regions that keeps the nation in the same boat. The PP does raise these questions, but it also plays with fire: raising Francoist and civil war-era spectres of the break-up of Spain.
When General José Mena Aguado, the Spanish army commander, last year issued a veiled threat of military intervention if Catalans got more powers he was, rightly, fired. But the PP seemed to think he had a point - especially in reaching back to the 1932 debates on Catalan autonomy. This is reactionary, in the strict sense of the word, and it is very dangerous.
It also makes PP hostility to two contentious laws - on "historical memory" and on civics education - extraordinarily revealing.
The first aims to overcome the negotiated amnesia of the post-Franco transition, whereby the crimes of the civil war and its vengeful aftermath would be forgotten (and the evidence, destroyed). That denied decent burial to many thousands of defeated Republicans, whose remains are being excavated all over Spain; about 500 mass graves have been found in Andalusia alone. The PP is outraged - and it has the support of the Church. They much prefer selective memory.
Indeed, Spain's bishops are looking forward to the beatification by the Vatican this October of 498 "martyrs" killed by anti-clerical Republicans in 1931-39 - adding provocatively to the previous record of 233 Francoist martyrs beatified in 2001.
In the second dispute, Spain's ultramontane hierarchy objects to civics "colonising the minds of the young", especially by preaching tolerance of homosexuality. Many bishops hanker back to Franco's time, when a concordat with the Vatican that would make an ayatollah weep with envy gave the Church state funding and control of schools. It also made Catholicism the sole religion and placed the clergy beyond the law.
The modern society Spain has become deserves better than this nostalgia for national-Catholicism. Although Mr Zapatero has acted to bring the law into line with the tolerance of that society, Spain could also do with restraint from the militant lay wing and the Jacobins inside the Socialist party. Spaniards who have nurtured their democratic emergence with courage and enthusiasm, imagination and civic pride, deserve better of their leaders.
They need a modern right, which sees Spain as a common endeavour - and is not fighting a rearguard action against the Enlightenment.
There are pictures that tell you a lot more than the thousand words they are proverbially said to be worth. Such a picture was widely reproduced this summer in Spain: of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, doing his best to shake hands with Mariano Rajoy, leader of the opposition Popular party at the entrance to the government's Moncloa palace. Mr Rajoy looks as though he cannot quite bring himself to greet the prime minister; he looks at Mr Zapatero's outstretched hand and clasps the watch on his own left hand - or perhaps he is just counting his fingers. Of course, as the newsreel reveals, they did shake hands.
But the hesitation about performing an act of common civility - think Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat on the White House lawn - is a lamentably accurate snapshot of the descent into incivility of Spanish public life: marked by factional self-indulgence that makes impossible any common view of the national interest.
The Zapatero-Rajoy summit was another failed attempt to reach a common stance on confronting Eta, the lumpen rump of Basque separatism that had just announced an end to its ceasefire. This is a question of state that the PP under Mr Rajoy - and his predecessor, José María Aznar, the former prime minister - have frequently manipulated for partisan gain.
But both the rhetoric and the ostensible substance of this polarisation go beyond the low politics of factional advantage, reviving the visceral idiom of "the two Spains" of the 1936-39 civil war.
That is in no way to suggest that anything like an armed conflict is in prospect. Merely that the traumas of that fratricidal conflagration are still bitterly in evidence - unresolved by the over-hyped transition from the Francoist dictatorship and the first democratic elections 30 years ago.
To begin with, this coarsening of politics seemed to be a story merely of bad faith, bad losers and bad blood.
In March 2004, after the horror of the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people, Spaniards summarily ejected a PP government that expected re-election and a seamless transition from Mr Aznar to Mr Rajoy. The PP has cried foul ever since, in a strident if confused attempt to impugn the legitimacy of the government (and presumably the electorate as well).
The only conspiracy that took place was the atrocity perpetrated by the mainly North African jihadis, radical Islamists influenced by al-Qaeda.
Spain's citizens did not flinch when confronted with this hyper-terrorism. On the contrary: they responded with an exemplary display of democratic conviction. First, well over 10m people poured into the streets to repudiate the bombers. Then, they turned out in equally impressive numbers to vote.
Normally, citizens rally around their government in moments of great societal stress. A majority of Spaniards did not because they were outraged at what they saw as manipulation of the tragedy by Mr Aznar and his officials, who insisted Eta was the culprit despite mounting and irrefutable evidence that jihadis did it. Presumably Mr Aznar needed to validate his hardline tactics; at the previous elections the government's inflammatory rhetoric antagonised a great many Basques but reaped a great many votes elsewhere in Spain.
The matter might have ended there. Spaniards would doubtless have judged this political petulance to be in the same category as the sour grapes of the Socialists when they lost in 1996. At that time, the Socialists deluded themselves they were victims of a rightwing press conspiracy, rather than political bankrupts in an advanced state of moral implosion after 14 years in power.
But as the recent trial of surviving train bombers demonstrated, this is not over. PP officials not only kept insisting Basque terrorists played a part; they even tried to introduce bogus evidence to prove it. There is a very different world-view here.
Under Mr Zapatero, the Socialists have been willing to negotiate the transfer of more powers to regional governments, such as the Catalans, who want the powers of taxation that the Basques already have. Spain's deep but asymmetric federalism does raise concerns, but these are mostly to do with equity: for example, the fiscal solidarity between rich and poor regions that keeps the nation in the same boat. The PP does raise these questions, but it also plays with fire: raising Francoist and civil war-era spectres of the break-up of Spain.
When General José Mena Aguado, the Spanish army commander, last year issued a veiled threat of military intervention if Catalans got more powers he was, rightly, fired. But the PP seemed to think he had a point - especially in reaching back to the 1932 debates on Catalan autonomy. This is reactionary, in the strict sense of the word, and it is very dangerous.
It also makes PP hostility to two contentious laws - on "historical memory" and on civics education - extraordinarily revealing.
The first aims to overcome the negotiated amnesia of the post-Franco transition, whereby the crimes of the civil war and its vengeful aftermath would be forgotten (and the evidence, destroyed). That denied decent burial to many thousands of defeated Republicans, whose remains are being excavated all over Spain; about 500 mass graves have been found in Andalusia alone. The PP is outraged - and it has the support of the Church. They much prefer selective memory.
Indeed, Spain's bishops are looking forward to the beatification by the Vatican this October of 498 "martyrs" killed by anti-clerical Republicans in 1931-39 - adding provocatively to the previous record of 233 Francoist martyrs beatified in 2001.
In the second dispute, Spain's ultramontane hierarchy objects to civics "colonising the minds of the young", especially by preaching tolerance of homosexuality. Many bishops hanker back to Franco's time, when a concordat with the Vatican that would make an ayatollah weep with envy gave the Church state funding and control of schools. It also made Catholicism the sole religion and placed the clergy beyond the law.
The modern society Spain has become deserves better than this nostalgia for national-Catholicism. Although Mr Zapatero has acted to bring the law into line with the tolerance of that society, Spain could also do with restraint from the militant lay wing and the Jacobins inside the Socialist party. Spaniards who have nurtured their democratic emergence with courage and enthusiasm, imagination and civic pride, deserve better of their leaders.
They need a modern right, which sees Spain as a common endeavour - and is not fighting a rearguard action against the Enlightenment.