Sophocles in Spain

PM Pedro Sánchez warned Spain that the far right might enter government if he lost. His best path to power now involves negotiating with a party that he used to accuse of having far-right tendencies.

"Oedipus and the Sphinx of Thebes, Red Figure Kylix, c. 470 BC, from Vulci, attributed to the Oedipus Painter, Vatican Museums" by Following Hadrian is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

In the best-known version of the Oedipus myth, from Greek tragedician Sophocles, Laius, the king of Thebes, and Queen Jocasta had a baby. An oracle told him that the child would grow up to kill him.

Horrified, Laius told Jocasta to kill the infant. She couldn’t bring herself to do it and told a servant to do it instead. The servant exposed the baby on a mountain, but the infant was discovered by a shepherd, who named him Oedipus (Swollen Foot). The shepherd took the baby to Corinth, where he was brought up by the childless king, Polybus, and his wife, Merope, as their own son.

Much later, Oedipus consulted with an oracle, who told him he was destined to kill his father and to mate with his mother. To escape his destiny and protect Polybus and Merope, he moved away from Corinth to Thebes. On the way there, he had a quarrel with an old man and his servants. He killed the man, who he much later came to realise was Laius, his biological father.

After solving the riddle of the Sphinx, a legendary beast that was oppressing Thebes, Oedipus was rewarded with kingship of the city-state and marriage with the dowager queen Jocasta, his biological mother. Both prophecies had come true. Sophocles tells the story backwards, like a modern detective film.

There are parallels between Sophocles’ tragedy and contemporary Spanish politics. Last Sunday’s elections were indecisive, yielding a hung parliament. Socialist Prime Minister (PM) Pedro Sánchez campaigned vigorously against hard-right party Vox, which he (quite correctly) characterized as being far right and (also correctly) said would be likely to become a junior partner in a coalition if he lost.

Sánchez now has the best path to forming a new government. His tragedy is that the clearest route to a coalition deal involves Junts, a Catalan separatist party he has criticised for its own far-right tendencies in the past.

Junts is the party of failed coup-monger Carles Puigdemont and his xenophobic successor Quim Torra. The party is now led by a former speaker of the Catalan parliament, Laura Borràs, who faces corruption charges. Like other enemies of institutionalism, the party often comes bearing conspiracy theories, particularly about the allegedly fascistic nature of Spanish democracy.

Junts represents the most tribalised side of Catalonia’s toxic politics, where everything orbits around the Catalan language. Spanish-speaking migrants and immigrants to Barcelona and their descendants are seen as outsiders, despite being a majority, while the party represents the region’s self-appointed elite, who speak Catalan at home and often have distinctive surnames, like Puigdemont, Torra or Borràs. Unfortunately, the party’s populist policies would crash the Catalan economy, bringing misery to many working-class and middle-class families, who rarely have surnames like this.

in 2018, when Torra became Catalan First Minister, 50 academics (quite correctly) described his toxic views about Catalonia’s Spanish-speaking majority as “pre-fascist.” He had written that it was “unnatural” to speak Spanish in Barcelona; was worried about the allegedly defective DNA of Spanish speakers; and infamously described residents in Barcelona who have yet to gain a good level of Catalan as “beasts in human form, scavengers, vipers, hyenas.” In power, he called for a Catalan civil war and defended radical separatists who were caught with bomb-making materials, some of whom have accused him of complicity in their plot. The trial of the alleged terrorists is ongoing.

Sánchez himself held a press conference in 2018 and (quite correctly) described Torra as the Spanish version of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen. These words are likely to return to hurt him as he negotiates a deal with Torra’s party. Like Laius and Oedipus, Sánchez did everything he could to escape what he saw as Spain’s fate (far-right involvement in mainstream politics), but his own attempts to avoid this fate will make the prophecy come true.

Luckily, the contours of a deal are unlikely to be too catastrophic for those residents in Barcelona who think Catalan nationalism is regressive and realise that the independence movement has always lacked a real majority. Puigdemont fled to Brussels after his coup attempt collapsed, allegedly in the boot of a car. His fellow conspirators who stayed were arrested, convicted and later pardoned by Sánchez. Puigdemont’s fellow party member, Clara Ponsati, has tested the waters by coming to Barcelona on Monday, where she was immediately arrested. The smart money is on Sánchez finding a way to get her out of jail if her party supports a coalition deal.

Articles 1, 2 and 92 of the Spanish Constitution ban any referendum on regional secession. Keeping Puigdemont, Ponsati and other Junts leaders out of prison is likely to be a much higher priority for both sides than tearing up the country’s legal framework in the name of nationalism.

Junts’ position in the negotiations is complicated by a landslide victory by the Socialists in Catalonia, which Junts sees as its personal fiefdom despite being out of power since 2022. Sánchez’s position of accepting the claims of some Catalan nationalists to be left-wing at face value while criticising some of the excesses of the independence movement appears to be a winning proposition in the region, which faces regional elections by 2025.

Election post-mortem

Sánchez called a snap general election in May after the Socialists received a drubbing in municipal and regional elections. He spent much of the campaign warning that the opposition Popular Party (PP) would do a coalition deal with Vox if he lost, which was probably true, although by no means a foregone conclusion if the PP came close to a majority in the vote.

In the end, the soft-right PP did come first, with 137 seats (33%), up 48, but this fell a long way short of the 176 needed for a majority. Vox plummeted to 33 (12%), down 19, which means the two national right-wing parties failed to get over 176.

Sánchez’s soft-left Socialists came second with 121 (32%), up one. Its junior coalition party, communist-led hard-left party Addition (Sumar), came fourth with 31, down seven. Taken together, the largest parties on the left got 152 seats. Four nationalist parties from the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia that have supported the coalition in the past gained 19 seats between them, bringing the potential total to 171.

Junts’ seven seats would be enough to get a Sánchez-led coalition deal over the line. An abstention would have been enough until the overseas vote rewarded the PP with an extra seat and removed one from the Socialists. If, however, Sánchez fails to get a deal done with Junts and other minority parties, there would be a second round of elections at the end of the year.

Followers of Sharpen Your Axe will be interested to see how our previous articles on the elections fared. Sánchez’s dealmaking with populists and nationalists since 2018 has indeed made many voters angry, as we predicted.

However, the polls failed to capture the resurgence of the Socialists in Catalonia, which helped the PM grow his number of seats, even as he was overtaken by the PP to his right. The Socialists gained seven seats in Catalonia, which more than made up for its poor performance in the rest of Spain.

Meanwhile, the PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, won a Pyrrhic victory. He was hurt by a muddle-headed strategy about how to handle deals with Vox. His party announced a number of regional deals with Vox in the runup to the general election, but failed to explain its thinking on the issue to the public well. Although its support rose, its performance fell short of expectations in the polls.

Funnily enough, Feijóo pitched patriotic abstentions (as suggested by Sharpen Your Axe) in his one televised debate with Sánchez. Failing to explain his strategy on Vox beforehand rather undercut this approach. The pitch would have worked much better before the municipal and regional elections than it did afterwards.

Looking ahead, the broad nature of the coalition will tend to dilute Sánchez and Sumar’s anti-markets tendencies. The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), an openly right-leaning member of the left-wing and regionalist coalition, will be called on to defend markets in the years ahead if there is a wide deal. Moreover, the PP now controls the Senate, Spain’s second house and will be able to delay some laws, although Sánchez likes governing by decree. Hopefully, the PP’s leaders will learn that questioning Sánchez’s legitimacy falls short of being a strategy to win a the national level.

In the longer term, the conditions for populism to thrive in Spain have receded. The two main populist parties, Vox and Sumar, each failed to break 13%. Vox and Sumar’s predecessor party were on 15% each in 2019. Vox did much better among men than it did among women; while Sumar did well with young university-educated voters.

It is worth noting that some 64% of the votes went for the two mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties. The return of bipartisan politics is here to stay, in my opinion. Sadly for liberals, Spanish politics will remain split between right-wing economic liberalism and left-wing social liberalism for the foreseeable future.

As always when we discuss populists, who all too often specialise in being annoying on the internet, the comments are closed. I won’t have access to the internet next Saturday, so your next essay will come on Friday instead. See you next week!

Further Reading

Oedipus the King by Sophocles, translated by Ian Johnston

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