A Tale of Two Socialists (Bonus Column)
Costa is a man who takes ethics seriously, while Sánchez has finally revealed himself to be a left-wing populist prepared to sell out any principles he claimed to have
"26.11.2022 Pedro Sánchez y Antonio Costa, en el Ágora 'Política energética europea. El caso de la península ibérica' 9" by Partido Socialista is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
I wrote this essay yesterday for publication next Saturday, but I think it is newsworthy enough to release it today as a bonus essay
On 7th November, António Costa, Portugal’s Socialist Prime Minister (PM), surprised the world by resigning from office, just hours after the authorities raided his home and several ministries as part of an investigation into a corruption scandal .
The country’s President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, said he wouldn’t dissolve parliament until lawmakers approved the 2024 budget, expected next month. The Socialists have a clear majority in Portugal after winning 120 seats in 2022 (a majority is 116). Costa agreed to stay on as caretaker PM until March, although he said he would have preferred to stand down immediately.
In a statement at the time of his resignation, Costa said: “The duties of prime minister are not compatible with any suspicion of my integrity.” As an institutionalist, Costa knows that he represents his party and Portugal’s institutions. We should all applaud his decision to resign, which shows that he is a man who takes ethics and principles seriously, no matter the eventual result of the investigation. He put the interest of his party and the Portuguese government above his own short-term interests.
Elsewhere in the Iberian peninsula, on 9th November, PM Pedro Sánchez announced that Spain’s Socialist Party had reached an agreement with a right-wing Catalan separatist party called Together (Junts). He had previously described one of its leaders as being a member of the far right. The deal will almost certainly let Sánchez govern for up to four years, despite coming second in the July elections with under 32% of the vote. Junts got less than 2% of the vote, but its seven seats made it a kingmaker.
The details of the deal left many people in Spain (including me) open-mouthed. Almost immediately, all four associations of Spanish judges rejected the deal, as did three associations of prosecutors and tax inspectors (summary here). Major law firms, including Broseta, Garrigues, Pérez-Llorca (co-founded by one of the seven Fathers of the 1978 Constitution) and Uría Menéndez have rejected it, as has the organisation representing lawyers in Madrid and the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), the governing body of the independent judiciary. Legal experts in Spain are normally scrupulous about staying out of politics, so this was all seriously unprecedented.
Before we see why the deal is so controversial, let’s backtrack for the benefit of readers outside Spain. Sánchez has represented the Socialists in five consecutive elections since 2015. He has lost three and won two, but never gained a majority of votes. However, he has managed to govern since winning a no-confidence vote in June 2018 by patching together deals with hard-left populists, as well as Catalan and Basque national populists and smaller parties.
I have always described Sánchez as “populist adjacent” up to now. He likes and understands populists; and feels much more comfortable in their company than he does with liberals, who could have held the balance of power. He has often spread watered down versions of populist narratives. My previous article on Sánchez’s dealmaking said that while he had engaged in some democratic backsliding as part of his horse-trading, he had always stayed within the Constitution.
All that changed on 9th November. Sánchez crossed every red line he had ever set. He agreed an amnesty for the national populists in Catalonia who had openly broken the law in a coup attempt in 2017 - something he had previously ruled out. He promised the nationalists some kind of referendum, without spelling out the details - another broken promise. He agreed to some staggering concessions, like letting the Catalan government administer all taxes raised in the rich region. And, most worryingly of all, he adopted populist narratives about “lawfare” and agreed to parliamentary commissions to oversee the judiciary.
If you have never heard the word “lawfare” before, it was coined in the 1970s but gained popularity in the 21st century. It refers to the use of legal systems by authoritarian regimes to damage political opponents. However, populists have taken the word and run with it. They see it as a tool to submit an independent judiciary (one of the cornerstones of liberal democracy) to the “will of the people,” which they believe that they represent.
The late ruler of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (a left-wing populist), was a great fan of the concept, which he used to justify the arrest of a judge called María Lourdes Afiuni in 2009. This marked an important step in his process of democratic backsliding, which led to a full self-coup under his hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro in 2017, four years after Chávez’s death in 2013. After breaking the judiciary, Chávez and Maduro impoverished Venezuela from 2010 onwards.
In Spain, the Socialist deal is so bad that we can now say that Sánchez is a full populist, rather than just being populist adjacent. I would like to withdraw my previous comment that he is a fox rather than a hedgehog, which was based on the way he balanced deals with populists with respect for the Constitution. Sánchez has now shown himself to be a populist hedgehog, who has one model to understand the world. His has dropped his token support for the Constitution like a hot potato; and he has put his own interests above those of the institutions of Spanish democracy.
Like many populists, Sánchez has one big idea. He sees the opposition Popular Party (PP), which was established in 1989, as being tainted by the fact that some of its founders had previously been ministers under dictator Francisco Franco, who died in 1975. He sees Catalan nationalists as being legitimate allies, despite the family history of many of of the movement’s leaders, because they oppose the unity of Spain, which was one of Franco’s pet causes. The 1978 Constitution, which includes the unity of the country in its Article 2, is also tainted, in this view. His dislike of liberals (who are often seen as being right of centre in Spain) makes sense as part of this worldview.
Populists always hate the rule of law, particularly the independence of the judiciary. Sánchez’s decision to blow it up casts a previous scandal in a much worse light. The Socialists and the PP have long failed to agree to the renewal of the CGPJ. Sánchez’s side have spun this as being due to the PP being out of control, with some success. In fact, the PP have repeatedly asked to change the rules so judges can pick their peers, as is becoming common throughout the European Union (EU). Sánchez wants to continue to let politicians pick loyal judges.
One of Sánchez’s first acts as PM was to appoint a loyalist to the state polling agency. It has continually exaggerated support for the Socialists and depressed support for the PP, which gives it a dismal track record of calling elections. The scandal is little known outside Spain, but it shows how little Sánchez respects independent institutions. Expect much more of this in the years ahead if there is no rebellion by moderate Socialists (please don’t hold your breath as you wait).
It is worth mentioning that even the Socialist defence of the deal had a populist tone. For example, a tweet from the party on 9th November said that Spanish citizens “said yes to a Socialist government, co-existence and progress.” The implication was that the Socialists represent the will of the people; and can do whatever they want after coming second in the elections, no matter what they said during the campaign.
If you speak Spanish, you might want to look up the manifesto that the Socialists campaigned on before the July election. You can see it here. Try searching for words like referendum (“referéndum” in Spanish), amnesty (“amnistía”) or “lawfare.” There are zero results. There are 18 references to independence (“independencia”), but none of them refer to the judiciary. The section on Catalan independence (pp222-223) claims that the Socialists have backed the cohesion of Spanish society. It makes no mention at all of transferring tax income to the government of the autonomous community of Catalonia.
Far from being the will of the people, Sánchez’s dealmaking is so unpopular with the population that even the public pollster now puts the PP ahead. Private polls show the PP inching closer to a majority (it got 137 seats in July, while 176 are needed for a majority), while the Socialists have been losing ground since the last election. Only Socialists loyalists support the deal, including party members who voted to let Sánchez work with Junts. The deal is unpopular with moderates and floating voters.
The tax concessions to Catalonia should be seen as a time bomb. It makes Madrid the only rich autonomous community to support the 14 poorest regions (the Basque Country already controls all its own taxes). Madrid is controlled by the PP. The party is using it as a showcase for the benefits of investment-friendly policies, including moderate taxes, with a great deal of success. The Socialists have complained this counts as “fiscal dumping.” The Catalan deal will put fiscal pressure on Madrid.
The decision by infrastructure multinational Ferrovial to flip its headquarters to Amsterdam from Madrid before the elections in search of a better business environment looks very far-sighted now. Other multinationals could be tempted to follow suit in the months and years ahead. Madrid-based energy company Repsol has already said it will invest less in Spain due to Sánchez’s strange windfall tax on profits in the energy sector that have yet to be realised.
One of the most unexpected passages in the deal document heaped praise on José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a Socialist PM between 2004 and 2011, who is best known for mismanaging the aftermath of the credit crunch of 2007/8. The subsequent depression in Spain acted as a seedbed for populism. Zapatero also mismanaged his relations with the Catalan nationalists by promising a new regional statute that included unconstitutional clauses. He also took steps in a populist direction; and in recent years has defended Maduro’s economically illiterate regime in Venezuela, much to the disgust of many Spanish citizens.
I remember a bright friend of mine during Zapatero’s time in power, who said that his decision to base his identity on the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s instead of the transition to democracy of the 1970s would be very dangerous for Spain and for the Socialists. I thought she was exaggerating, but she was absolutely right. Sánchez is Zapatero’s heir; and the deal with Junts shows he is proud of it.
As I have said many times on this blog, ideas matter and words are important. While some of Sánchez’s critics have accused him of executing a self-coup, I don’t think that is correct yet. In fact, Sánchez has revealed himself to be a left-wing populist like Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela, rather than a social democrat like Costa in Portugal. His controversial deal with Junts should be considered an extreme case of democratic backsliding. The longer he stays in power, the more likely he is to corrode a series of important institutions in Spain. It might turn into a slow-motion coup, but we aren’t there yet, however alarming the deal with the Catalan nationalists looks.
If Sánchez remains in office for the next four years and beyond, it will be a challenge for the EU, which has struggled to contain democratic backsliding by right-wing populists in Poland and Hungary. Luckily, Polish institutionalists did well in recent elections and should be able to form a government. Will the EU be able to apply the brakes on Sánchez as he tries to make Spanish society worse? It is hard to say, but many people in Spain will be scrutinising messages from Brussels and keeping a close eye on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, which currently rates Spain as one of the world’s few full democracies.
Sánchez’s provocations are also a challenge for his opponents on the right. As I have said before, there is a difference between legitimacy and political capital. Sánchez doesn’t have enough political capital to do something quite so controversial. However, his dealmaking is perfectly legitimate, as long as his concessions stay within the limits set by the Constitution. There is a massive question mark over the extent that this will be the case in the future given that his concessions to populists have gone far enough for us to call him a populist in his own right.
There are also risks for the PP. Criticising Sánchez’s dealmaking is entirely valid. However, the left-right spectrum is a horseshoe. The further you go to the extremes, the more likely you are to find populists on either side, who often share many characteristics. Many of the legitimate protests against Sánchez have descended into violence as far-right activists have fought the police outside Socialist headquarters.
The PP’s leaders must continue to criticise Sánchez and call protests against his democratic backsliding. However, at the same time, they have a duty to criticise any headbangers and troublemakers on the far right who want to discredit the whole movement. By all means, demonstrate against Sánchez, but please make sure go home afterwards. There is no excuse to burn rubbish bins, fight the police or spray paint death threats to Socialists. Fighting the police to defend the rule of law is like getting drunk to defend sobriety. It just doesn’t make sense.
Finally, let’s give the last word to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
This week’s column is likely to provoke cognitive dissonance in Catalan nationalists, who believe that democracy is fascism and coups are democratic; and left-wing populists, who will have never read a word on populism. All these people can be very irritating on the internet, so the comments are closed for the week. See you next week!
Further Reading
What Is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller
How Democracy Ends by David Runciman
The Tribalization of Europe: A Defence of our Liberal Values by Marlene Wind
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