Free Advice For Feijóo
The PP needs a positive vision of an investor-friendly future; and it needs to set clear red lines about what it will and won't negotiate
Alberto Núñez Feijóo in June 2023, European People’s Party, EPP Summit, 29 June, Brussels, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
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The Spanish political scene is even more of a toxic mess than usual right now. Socialist Prime Minister (PM) Pedro Sánchez has gradually revealed himself to be a left-wing populist instead of a mainstream centre-left institutionalist. He has managed to find a way to continue governing despite coming second in the July elections with just under 32% of the vote. His fragile alliance is held together by promises of an amnesty for hard-right Catalan nationalists who tried and failed to hold a coup d’etat in 2017.
Sánchez’s dealmaking tends to be purely transactional. He only started talking about an amnesty for Catalan separatists after the elections when it became clear that offering one would be the only way for him to return to power. His right-wing allies in Catalonia, who got less than 2% of the total vote, are just expected to vote for him to become PM and maybe support a budget or two. The amnesty proposal is incredibly unpopular with people outside Catalonia or the Basque Country - more than 70% of Spanish voters hate the proposal. More than half of Catalan voters dislike it, as do 40% of Socialist voters. Sánchez is cashing in political capital that he simply doesn’t have.
In the days before this essay was published, Together (Junts), the hard-right Catalan separatist party that Sánchez needs to govern, had some fun testing his limits. The party publicly demanded the right to fine companies that moved their headquarters away from Barcelona during its coup attempt in 2017-8 if they don’t return voluntarily. This was a far-fetched condition for supporting Socialist legislation. The demand is clearly completely incompatible with European law on free movement of capital, but the leaders of Junts care very little for the rule of law.
The Socialists and Together patched together a last-minute deal, without conceding on a frankly silly demand. Controversially, though, the Socialists ceded management of immigration in Catalonia to the regional government. It was only five years ago that Sánchez publicly described Together’s leader at the time, Quim Torra, as the “Spanish version of [Marine] Le Pen” and accused him of “xenophobia and racism.” Why would a left-wing party make concessions on immigration to Torra’s party? Together’s leaders have said that the party wants to make learning Catalan a key criterion for regularising undocumented workers; and Basque nationalists are now demanding a similar concession in their own autonomous community.
Sánchez has very little of what the first President George Bush infamously called “the vision thing” to make his pork-barrel trading look more acceptable to voters. The PM throws the word “progressive” around to justify his dealmaking, without necessarily defining it or reflecting about the regressive nature of many of his nationalist allies in Catalonia and the Basque Country, including Together. He seems to use the word as a catch-all term to refer to any parties that oppose Vox, a hard-right Spanish nationalist party that got 12% of the vote in July.
In a fragmented parliament, Vox would be the only possible ally of the centre-right Popular Party (PP), which won the elections under the leadership of Alberto Núñez Feijóo with 33%. Left-wing populists and Basque and Catalan nationalists often smear the PP as being a fascist party. It hasn’t helped its own cause in recent years by cutting deals with Vox, which recruited some of its leadership from the neo-fascist Falange, as well as others who came from from the PP’s right wing.
Sánchez is set on his course, which involves doing deals with populists, while implying that the PP’s troubled relationship with Vox puts it beyond the pale. At the same time, he is slowly eroding the institutions that are meant to hold populists back, for example, by trying to implement political oversight of the independent judiciary when judges investigate crimes by politicians who don’t believe in the rule of law, including Together in Catalonia.
Sánchez’s strategy is very easy to understand. It is based on cold-hearted dealmaking skill in a polarised political scene. He will always try to make the centre-right own the excesses of the hard right, while refusing to take responsibility for the excesses of the Socialists’ populist allies. He wants to apply a cordon sanitaire against Vox, but not against any other parties.
In this context, floating voters have a narrow path to getting Spain back on track*. The PP needs to beat the Socialists in a national election. This would give the Socialists the chance to rebuild in opposition, preferably under a leadership team who want to return to mainstream social democratic politics. In the best-case scenario, the centre-left party would pivot to green liberalism under a new leader in opposition.
This week’s column will give some free advice to PP leader Feijóo. I blog in English and the politician barely speaks the language. Although I am bilingual, I have decided against translating it into Spanish. If Feijóo ever wins a national election, he will have to deal with European summits in English. Consider this practice.
Before I begin, let me say that I am pessimistic that Feijóo would be able to execute my advice competently. I made sure that people in the PP saw a previous column on patriotic abstentions (which I did translate into Spanish). To my surprise, Feijóo did play this card in 2023! However, he messed it up. He made his move in a pre-election debate instead of before an earlier round of regional elections, as I had recommended. The PP had already cut a series of deals with Vox, which removed the power of the move when he made it. In politics, as in comedy, timing is everything.
Elections are won in the middle ground
Before we discuss my advice, let me give some background. Spain’s Centre for Sociological Research (CIS) asks respondents their self-identification on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is extreme far-left and 10 is extreme far-right. Some people will tend to put themselves in a strange place on the horseshoe, not least those Catalan separatists who hold the odd idea that nationalism is progressive. Even so, the results are interesting. In November 2023, the survey showed the following results:
1 13.2%
2 5.5%
3 11.5%
4 8.1%
5 21.6%
6 7.8%
7 9.1%
8 5.9%
9 1.2%
10 10.2%
(A further 1.9% didn’t know the answer and 4.1% declined to answer)
If we break this down a little, the average position on the horseshoe was 4.99, which looks at the centre with a slight left-leaning bias. Self-identifying as a 5 was the most popular position, with more than one in five of the electorate to be found here.
The logical conclusion is that centrism remains the best way of winning elections in Spain. It is probably easiest from the centre-left (41.2% of the electorate see themselves as 3, 4 or 5) but pure centrism is almost as good (38.5% on 5, 6 and 7), as is centrism with a slight bias to the moderate left (37.5% on 4, 5, 6).
Sánchez renounced the middle ground when he refused to cut a deal with a now defunct liberal centrist party called Citizens (Ciudadanos) in 2018, as discussed here. His move away from the centre has been exacerbated by his recent pivot to left-wing populism and his deals with separatists. Sánchez’s move to the flanks creates a great opportunity for Feijóo to dominate the centre of the chessboard. The PP needs to position itself as centrally as possible without alienating the party’s moderate Christian democrat base, which sits towards the right flank.
"Chess" by romainguy is marked with CC0 1.0.
The strategy for the PP should be clear. It needs to absolutely dominate the centre ground without renouncing its position on the centre-right. It also needs to distance itself from the far right as much as possible so that disaffected Socialist voters on the centre left feel comfortable abstaining in protest at Sánchez’s pivot to populism.
Before we go on, let’s discuss what a centrist voter looks like. More than three quarters of the Spanish population describe themselves as non-practicing Catholics, agnostics, people who are indifferent to religion and atheists; and we can expect this to be particularly true of voters in the middle of the horseshoe and to the left. These voters are likely to be broadly socially progressive and largely supportive of the welfare state while also backing investor-friendly market-based policies.
The rest of this essay will discuss how to sell a positive vision of investment and growth based on storytelling technique; while reassuring centrist voters that the PP isn’t about to let Vox drag it into reactionary territory if it needs its support as a junior partner to form a government.
La Liga
One of the problems with Spanish politics is that leaders of mainstream parties are surprisingly reluctant to win political capital by setting out a positive vision of the future or simplifying complex ideas into easy-to-understand metaphors. For someone like Feijóo, who wants to attract investors into the economy, it would be much easier to run as an incumbent based on positive results. He doesn’t have that luxury, so storytelling skills (which are notable by their absence) are going to be very necessary**.
Spain is a country that is obsessed about football. This can provide Feijóo with a metaphor to sell economic liberalism. The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is just over $30,000. This is pretty middle-of-the-road for Europe. Feijóo should sell the idea that Spain has a second-division economy and talk about winning promotion to the top league.
Feijóo’s references should be Ireland, which got above $100,000 per head by attracting corporate investment through modest tax rates. He should talk about Germany (more than $50,000), which actually makes things and has a well-developed apprenticeship system. He should talk about how the UK (nearly $47,000) would be doing better without Brexit. He should also benchmark France (nearly $43,000), where its liberal President, Emmanuel Macron, has encouraged a vibrant startup ecosystem with state investment in disruptive projects.
Feijóo should talk about the opportunities that will come from the energy transition and a world rich in data. As we discussed two weeks ago, Spain already has two significant startup hubs in Barcelona and Madrid, as well as having emergent hubs in Bilbao, Málaga and Valencia. There is also a hub nearby in Lisbon, Portugal.
The PP leader should look for political talent among entrepreneurs and investors who have had significant exits. He should regularly meet with people from the startup scene to see how a PP government could support it. He should pitch building better transport links to Lisbon, for example, by connecting it to Madrid by high-speed rail.
Feijóo should also pitch attracting entrepreneurial talent to Spain from elsewhere in the European Union (EU), as well as from those Latin American countries that are ruled by populists. He can make the point in a very simple way by giving at least one front-line political role to one of the many Latin American entrepreneurs who have moved to Spain (and particularly Madrid) over the last two and a half decades; and drawing parallels with the many Latin American footballers who have made La Liga so thrilling. A moderately pro-immigration stance would also be likely to draw the ire of Vox, but this will be helpful for a centrist repositioning of the PP, as we will discuss in depth in the next section.
Although the metaphor of going up a league contains an easy-to-understand lesson in economics, it also has a sharp edge. Feijóo can also mention how the references of left-wing populists are in the lower leagues, whether that is Argentina (under $11,000), Cuba (under $10,000) or Venezuela (under $16,000). He can also talk about how the independence of Catalonia and the Basque Country would be equivalent to relegation.
"Puma Spain World Champion shirt rear" by BrokenSphere is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Ambassador
We already mentioned that centrist voters tend to be socially progressive and secular. Many of them will find Vox genuinely terrifying, which probably explains why support for the PP came below expectations in July. Poll after poll had revealed that the party’s only options of forming a government would be with the help of the headbangers from the hard right. How should Feijóo manage the PP’s relations with Vox in a way that reassures people in the centre of the horseshoe?
I have mentioned this before, but if you sit down and read Vox’s manifesto, you will find a potpourri of semi-contradictory ideas from Spanish nationalism to economic liberalism to protectionism to reactionary ultra-Catholic social policies to populist nativism. None of it is very coherent. The only common theme is that the party focuses on emotionally explosive topics that resonate with angry people.
A surprisingly large number of Vox’s proposals would involve completely rewriting the Constitution of 1978. This suggests a way forward for Feijóo in his dealings with the party to his right. He should base his red lines on the Constitution; and decline to negotiate any changes to the country’s basic law if he wins, with a particular emphasis on maintaining hard-won minority rights.
As background, Spain is one of the country’s with the highest levels of support for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in the West. A poll in 2021 showed that 10% of the population identify as LGBT, while 54% of those who don’t identify with the community have friends and family members who do. A full 91% would support a friend or family member who came out as LGB, which drops a little to 87% for trans acceptance. All these numbers are higher than in Britain, Denmark, France Germany, Italy, Sweden or the US.
Vox swims against the current of a tolerant society. The hard-right party is concerned about the erosion of what it sees as old-fashioned masculine values. It has a long track record of bigoted and conspiratorial dog whistles about LGBT people, as well as saying outright that it would prioritise adoption by heterosexual couples over less traditional families. The party also gushes over Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who has passed regressive anti-LGBT laws.
When Vox has joined forces with the PP since February 2023, it has pushed for the removal of LGBT flags from outside town halls. In the run-up to the July 2023 election, the party published an advert showing a hand throwing an LGBT flag in the rubbish bin, along with Agenda 2030. In December 2023, one of its leaders, a former soldier who used to belong to the neo-fascist Falange, chucked a water bottle at an openly gay councillor from a left-wing party in Madrid town hall.
None of this is acceptable to people in the middle of the horseshoe. The PP needs to take a public stand on minority rights if it wants the backing of centrist voters and the abstention of people on the centre left. If Feijóo took this issue seriously, he should make a big song and dance about the PP’s support for Article 14 of the Constitution and how this is absolutely non-negotiable under any circumstances.
Article 14
Spaniards are equal before the law and may not in any way be discriminated against on account of birth, race, sex, religion, opinion or any other personal or social condition or circumstance.
Why not announce this red line in a speech to the LGBT community? Why not make some “14” badges for all PP spokespeople? Why not appoint an openly gay member of the PP (preferably someone with expertise in constitutional law) to be the party’s ambassador to handle all negotiations with Vox? All of this would help make a very clear point to centrist voters, who are worried about the risks of letting the reactionary hard right into government as a junior partner in a coalition deal.
If Vox reacts badly to the provocation, it would actually help Feijóo’s strategic positioning as the leader of a centrist party. A strong defence of LGBT rights might feel uncomfortable to Feijóo, given that the PP’s base is made up of moderate Christian democrats, who might be a little less socially progressive than secular voters in the true centre of the horseshoe. However, the Catholic church’s views on these issues are evolving. Also, the tiny minority of Spaniards who wouldn’t support friends or family members who come out as LGBT probably already vote for Vox. In short, strong support for LGBT rights from the centre-right has very little downside.
As always, Macron in France is showing the way. Faced with a resurgent far right, he recently appointed openly gay politician Gabriel Attal to be the country’s youngest-ever Prime Minister. Could there be a better way of showing the difference between liberal centrists and the hard right? Having said that, the situation is slightly more complicated in France than it is in Spain, as far-right leader Le Pen has sought votes from gay men who are concerned at Muslim immigration after dropping her previous opposition to gay marriage. She remains a firm supporter of Hungarian strongman Orbán, though.
Returning south of the Pyrenees, let me repeat a statistic. We have seen that 37.5% of the Spanish electorate consider themselves to be pure centrists with a slight bias to the moderate left. A strong victory in this segment, which is largely secular, combined with a big chunk of the PP’s traditional church-going centre-right vote, could lead to a thumping victory, particularly if a section of voters on the true centre-left abstain. Feijóo won the July elections with 33.1%; and the last time the PP won a majority, in 2011, it did so with 44.6% of the vote. Getting above 40% looks achievable if the PP plays its cards well.
It is worth pointing out that turnout rates have fallen from 71.8% in April 2019 (the high point of defunct liberal party Citizens) to 66.6% now, which implies more than 5% of the electorate are sitting on the sidelines and waiting for a more centrist option in the future. Persuading many of these voters to cast votes for the PP should put it within spitting distance of a majority, particularly if many disgruntled Socialist voters outside Catalonia and the Basque Country decide to abstain in protest at the amnesty. Sidelining Vox might also persuade some hard-right voters to switch their votes to the PP as the best way of stopping Sánchez.
Also, the closer the PP gets to a majority, the easier the party’s leadership would find to cut deals with mainstream regionalist parties instead of just relying on Vox to get it over the line. The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which got just over 1% in July, could once again ally with a PP that put some distance between itself and Vox. The hard-right party failed to get any seats in the Basque Country in July. The PNV has already staked out an LGBT-friendly position on the centre right.
It is worth mentioning that regional elections are looming in the Basque Country. There are scenarios that could end the PNV’s understanding with the Socialists. I will drill down into these issues in depth in next week’s essay. For now, though, it is just worth mentioning that the upside in a strong LGBT-friendly stance encompasses future deals with the PNV, as well as making a pitch to centrist voters. A strong defence of minority rights is also the right thing to do.
Opposition
Both ideas - the metaphor of going up a league as a way of selling economic liberalism and drawing clear red lines on how to handle Vox based on the Constitution and fighting discrimination - are designed to work together and create synergies. Just doing one of these would be much less powerful than doing both together. Feijóo needs to sell the idea that a gay-friendly stance will attract entrepreneurial talent to Spain and help transform the country’s economy. His team should actively seek out LGBT entrepreneurs and investors; and he should ask them if they want to get involved with his project.
Even if Feijóo does adopt both my suggestions for sensible centrist storytelling and distance from Vox on immigration, constitutional law and minority rights, there will still be hurdles ahead. Sánchez is an excellent tactician and a much better strategist than many realise. Feijóo will need to provide vigorous opposition without barking at the moon every time the Socialist leader does something outrageous.
Feijóo can use the metaphor of going up a league to fight Sánchez’s populist tendencies: Spain needs investment to grow; and investors need the presence of a law-abiding government before they allocate capital to projects. The PP leader should promise to pass a judicial independence law as his very first act if he becomes PM.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, though, I doubt Feijóo is good enough at strategic thinking to implement my modest proposal. At the time of writing, he is floating the idea of banning separatist parties that promote illegal independence referendums. The tactics just about make sense - the PP wants to steal some votes from Vox, which has long had similar policies. The strategy, however, is terrible. Why would people on the centre-left choose to abstain if the PP steals Vox’s most illiberal policies? How on Earth would such a harsh measure bring the PP closer to the PNV, which might hold the balance of power in a hung parliament?
Extremists can be very annoying on the internet and Vox supporters are no different. Surprising numbers of them struggle to deal with cognitive dissonance generated when people like me suggest that the party is bigoted. Reply-guy arguments about the party being against “LGBT ideology” but not against LGBT people get boring very quickly. The comments are closed. See you next week!
Further Reading
Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes by Aurelian Craiutu
*Being a floating voter is the best position for those of us who accept that power corrupts. This is a hard conclusion for those of us who brought up with the idea that we should never vote for the away team!
**”Show, don’t tell” is the basic principle of storytelling. Feijóo needs to show centrist voters that the PP is on the same side rather than just telling them. Many of the suggestions in this essay are grounded in this principle. Appointing an openly gay person to a frontline position is more powerful than making a speech about supporting LGBT rights.
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