Political Capital and Legitimacy

A guide to Spain's bad-tempered political scene

By Infinauta - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12006228

When I graduated in philosophy in 1991, I decided against continuing with a post-graduate degree. Although I’d enjoyed my deep dive into the subject, I felt it was a little geeky and disconnected from everyday life. Instead, I decided to move to Madrid and learn Spanish while I taught business executives how to speak English. I eventually ended up moving ino journalism.

Over the years, though, I noticed something strange. Philosophy had seemed disconnected from everyday life, but the reverse was also true: Everyday life could be a little lacking in the rigour required to study formal logic. This seemed particularly true as social media took off from about 2007. Nobody defined their terms at the beginning of a debate! Things very soon tended to get messy. I ended up writing a book about how a touch of philosophy can help us manage deep disagreements.

The contemporary Spanish political scene is badly in need of a little philosophy right now. As The Economist correctly pointed out at the beginning of December, Spaniards are much too grumpy about their politics. The left (including Basque and Catalan nationalists, strangely enough) and the right (including liberals) are hopelessly split, much to the despair of those of us who once had dreams of the country’s centre-left joining forces with its liberals to marginalize separatism and populism by emphasizing sensible reforms.

The usual sniping across the great divide can often turn into questions of legitimacy. This is genuinely dangerous territory. Jan-Werner Müller, a scholar of populism, tells us that populists are at their most dangerous when they deny the legitimacy of their opponents or question the rules of the game. Those who question the legitimacy of whole sections of the population, as Catalan nationalists do with the region’s Spanish-speaking majority, are particularly dangerous.

As we have seen before, narcissistic populists think of themselves as the living embodiment of “the will of the people.” In fact, liberal democracy is a way of getting rid of elected officials who have overstayed their time at the top, while protecting individual rights - a more negative view.

In order to turn down the heat a little while trying to increase the light, I will begin by defining two terms. Legitimacy is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as being according to the rules. I would contrast this with political capital, which is won through a landslide victory in an election and is spent by taking unpopular decisions that might or might not yield long-term results.

The concept of political capital was first developed by theorists from the 1960s, but it remains a little obscure with the general public. I first became aware of it when I was a Lobby reporter in the House of Commons for 18 months in 2000-2001. New Labour leader Tony Blair had won a landslide victory in 1997 (418 seats, compared to 330 needed for a simple majority). He later won 412 seats in 2001. The people around Blair were aware that he had accumulated huge amounts of political capital.

The idea was to cash in Blair’s political capital from back-to-back victories with one big, unpopular decision. While I was in the Lobby, it seemed likely that he might push the UK to join the euro. Eventually, though, he decided to support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This led to the largest demonstration in London’s history, but even so Blair managed to win 355 seats in the next election in 2005.

Turning to Spain, a section of the country’s left has always been distrustful of the centre-right Popular Party (PP). It was founded in 1989 by Manuel Fraga, a former minister under dictator Francisco Franco. Some leftists and regionalists feel that the PP’s association with establishment figures who participated in the Transition to Democracy should make the party a pariah. While tour bus commentators can get excited by these claims, cooler heads realize that the PP is very moderate compared to the UK Conservative Party or the US Republican Party. Research started in 2017 showed that the PP even sits to the left of Emmanuel Macron’s liberal party in France.

A photogenic Socialist called Pedro Sánchez became leader of Spain’s opposition in 2014. Although not a full populist at first, he has always been more attentive to anti-PP narratives than mainstream Socialists had been before. In 2015, he accused PP Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of lacking common decency in a televised debate that shocked many. Sánchez then led the Socialists to defeat in 2015 and 2016 before resigning as party leader. He made an unexpected comeback in 2017, mere months before an illegal referendum in Catalonia.

The current cycle began in 2018. A court found senior figures in the PP guilty of corruption on an epic scale. Liberal party Citizens (Cs) withdrew its support for Rajoy’s minority government. As discussed here, Cs’ former leader Albert Rivera said he would support a vote of no confidence as long as it was just used to trigger an election. Sánchez disagreed; and cobbled together a “Frankenstein” coalition including populists and Basque and Catalan nationalists. He then ruled for ten months without a working majority.

There were two inconclusive elections in 2019, with support for Cs imploding in the second one after ruling out a deal with Sánchez. The Socialists won both, but fell long short of a majority both times. After the second election, Sánchez agreed a minority coalition with populist left party United We Can (UP) - an option that he had said would give him sleepless nights before the election. He has continued to govern thanks to votes from nationalist allies, including those of a party that is led by a convicted member of a disbanded terrorist organization and Catalan separatists.

In theory, deals to bring populist parties into the mainstream could be healthy. In practice, though, this would only work if the main party is coming into the negotiating room with a majority. The current situation embodies a principal-agent problem. Any concessions made by the populists will be to help Sánchez, which isn’t necessarily the same as being good for Spain.

As part of the quid pro quo with his separatist allies, Sánchez has pardoned the Catalan nationalists who attempted a self-coup in 2017; as well as abolishing the crime of sedition and reducing the sentence for embezzlement by public officials, as long as they don’t personally benefit from breaking the rules. Both reforms are designed to reduce the risks for Catalan nationalists and other populist rebels against liberal democracy in the future.

Unsurprisingly, Sánchez’s dodgy deals are extremely unpopular with many liberals and conservatives, not to mention the far right. Moderate social democrats and ordinary voters are at best unconvinced. One common criticism on the right of the spectrum is the idea that Sánchez is an illegitimate Prime Minister. Using the definition above, we can see this is incorrect. Everything he has done has been in line with the letter of the law. However, as someone who has never won a majority at a general election, it would be true to say that Sánchez is extremely lacking in political capital.

Some of Sánchez’s proposed reforms also cross the line into populism by rigging the rules of the game to make it easier for his populist allies to go wild at some unspecified point in the future. His government has effectively weakened the guardrails of democracy. Reducing sentences for the misuse of public funds is particularly unpopular with the average voter.

Decriminalizing corruption seems a strange decision by a politician who first came to power thanks to a vote of no confidence against a government that had been tainted by a kickback scandal. It is likely to hurt the Socialists in the polls throughout 2023 in what is likely to be a difficult year for incumbents. The country’s manufacturing sector is already in a technical recession and an election is due by the end of the year. Also, while the concessions will keep some of his Catalan separatist allies briefly happy, it will never be enough for people who see independence as a magic bullet for all of society’s problems.

Sánchez and his allies are quick to hurl accusations of populism back at the PP, who they accuse of being irresponsible in opposition. There is an element of truth to these claims, but they are also a little overblown. The two main parties need to agree the renovation of judicial roles. The Socialists want to stick with the letter of the Constitution, which allows for horse-trading of judges between the two main parties; while the PP want to honour the spirit of the Constitution, which says that Spain should be “an advanced democracy.” The European Union (EU) has been encouraging governments to let judges pick their peers in recent years; and the PP wants Spain to start doing the same.

The Socialists recently changed a law on the appointment on judges, which is like pouring petrol on the fire. EU sources have discretely briefed against the reform - something that is worth bearing in mind if Sánchez’s strident anti-PP rhetoric resonates with you.

In December, Sánchez’s ongoing flirtation with populism led to a fierce debate in Spain’s Congress between supporters of popular sovereignty and institutional guardrails, with both sides accusing the other of being undemocratic. This debate lacked subtlety, with the left (plus nationalists) defending popular sovereignty in an unsophisticated way, while the right (including liberals) blurred the lines between democratic backsliding and self-coups, which will be a topic for a future column.

The debate between popular sovereignty and democratic guardrails was foreshadowed in 2017 by the fight over the independence of Catalonia. The region’s nationalists declared that roughly a third of the population of the region were sovereign and invited these people to vote in an illegal referendum that was the centre-piece of a self-coup. The rest of the population were smeared as illegitimate and expected to stay at home on the day of the fake referendum. To their credit, supporters of liberal democracy took to the streets of Barcelona soon afterwards, with many demanding that former regional president Carles Puigdemont be jailed for openly breaking the rule of law.

The Catalan debate was a little difficult for the Socialists. After the country’s transition to democracy, the Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC) was formed through the merger of three local parties in the late 1970s. It allied with the Socialist Workers’ Party of Spain (PSOE), but always developed a slightly strange brand of politics, which was much more attuned to the Catalan nationalism that was hegemonic among the regional elite in rich areas of Barcelona than it was to defending working-class Spanish speakers in the city’s industrial outskirts. The PSC has historically had a vague commitment to federalism as a way of squaring the circle between centre-left social policies and a watered-down version of frankly right-wing identity politics.

In late 2017, Sánchez’s PSOE allied with the PP and other parties to temporarily cancel Catalonia’s devolved powers under Article 155 of the Constitution, a move that the PSC found difficult to swallow. The Spanish parliament called snap regional elections to reset liberal democracy after the failure of Puigdemont’s coup.

Since 2018, as Sánchez has sought deals with Catalan separatists and other populists, his position has gradually become more aligned with the PSC’s federalism and tolerance of nationalist excess. It is for this reason that Sánchez - a politician who has never won a majority in an election - now defends popular sovereignty against those who emphasize democratic guardrails.

We can see Sánchez’s evolution between May 2018, when he quite correctly said the ethno-nationalist wing of the Catalan independence movement was equivalent to the far right in other European countries, and December 2022, when he incorrectly accused the independent judiciary of being part of a “crude plot” to block the legitimate government from doing exactly as it pleased - much to the disgust of judicial associations.

As we saw recently, people who fight with monsters risk becoming monsters themselves. Sánchez has become increasingly authoritarian as he has fought those that he sees as authoritarians on the right. At the same time, the shriller voices in the opposition have moved into populist territory by questioning Sánchez’s legitimacy as he has become increasingly populist himself.

In essence, much of the current debate over legitimacy and political capital hinges on the extent to which mainstream parties can enter coalitions with populists. Sánchez thinks that the Socialists should be able to do whatever deals he likes, while demonizing the far-right party Vox, which would be a natural ally of the PP. Meanwhile, the conservatives want to reserve the right to do a deal with Vox (which is a breakaway party started by the PP’s right wing) while demonizing Sánchez’s pacts with the communist-led UP and various nationalist and separatist parties.

Of course, the sensible option would be for the Socialists and the PP to realize that they have more in common than they realize and to try and hammer out a national unity government if the next election results in a tie. Another option would be to agree to a system of patriotic abstentions so that the winners of elections can govern without the support of extremists if they fall short of a full majority. However, the PP and the Socialists were unable to cut a deal at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, so I wouldn’t hold my breath! I’m turning off the comments for this column. See you next week!

Further Reading

What Is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen

The Tribalization of Europe by Marlene Wind

Why did Russian dictator Vladimir Putin support Catalan independence in 2017?

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