"The Abyss Gazes Back"

Spanish politicians copy the monsters they think they are fighting

"Nietzsche" by eozikune is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

In 1886, Friedrich Nietzsche, the favourite philosopher of angry teenagers everywhere, published Beyond Good and Evil. The book contains perhaps his most famous aphorism: “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.”

The phrase has rightly become very well known because it captures something essential about human nature, just like Lord Acton’s dictum, which teaches us that power tends to corrupt. Nietzsche shows us that if we define ourselves in opposition to our enemies, we can end up copying their worst characteristics. Indeed, modern research shows that conspiracy theorists are more likely to conspire - a case in point.

Today’s column will look at a series of very strange examples from Spain, where I live. Our tale begins in the 1930s, when Francisco Franco won a brutal Civil War and violently repressed his enemies. By 1953, he had pivoted away from full-on fascism and positioned himself as an anti-communist dictator. In the following years, technocrats encouraged tourism and modernized the economy, leading to the Spanish miracle. After the dictator’s death in 1975, senior figures in the regime committed to constitutional democracy and helped build Christian democratic factions, which morphed into the heart of the centre-right Popular Party (PP).

The situation was much stranger in Catalonia, a rich and industrialized region in the northeast of the country. Catalan nationalists gained control of the regional government in 1977 and have basically ruled the region ever since, switching between allegedly left-wing nationalists (the Republican Left of Catalonia or ERC), right-wing nationalists (Convergence & Union or CiU and successor parties) and allegedly non-nationalists, who in practice uncritically accept many of the other side’s tropes (the Socialist party in alliance with ERC and the local green party).

Over these years, the hardcore Catalan nationalists have developed a big lie that Spanish democracy is somehow tainted by the fact that democracy emerged through a transitional regime change rather than a violent revolution. This idea ignores a huge number of inconvenient truths. ERC had a fascist wing in the 1930s and Franco’s own brother Ramón was a deputy for the party from 1931. After his brother’s uprising, he joined the national side in October 1936, but died soon afterwards. In June 1936, Catalan State split from ERC; and in November it betrayed the Republic and tried to deliver a semi-independent Catalonia to Franco’s side. It failed.

Meanwhile, many Catalan Carlists fought for Franco’s side. In November 1938, the Republic lost the brutal Battle of the Ebro to the National side. Barcelona was a little more than 100 miles away, but the city gave up without a fight. Rich Catalans danced in the street as Franco’s troops entered Barcelona. Republican Madrid hung on grimly, even though the war was lost.

During Franco’s long reign, he loved Catalonia, Barcelona and Barça. He gave the football club three medals in 1951, 1971 and 1974. It is worth mentioning that Òmnium Cultural, a Catalan nationalist organization, was founded by former soldiers for the National side in 1961; and was decriminalized in 1967.

After the dictator’s death in 1975, his former mayors in Catalonia fell over themselves to form CiU, an establishment right-wing Catalan nationalist party that took a populist turn around 2012. It ruled the region from 1980 to 2003; and again from 2010 to 2016. Its successor parties, which often have names that are based on the word Together (Junts), ruled from 2016 to 2021 and only recently left a coalition government led by ERC. The current president of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès (ERC), is himself the grandson of one of Franco’s mayors.

Following the movement’s populist turn, nationalists have described the Catalan-speaking minority as true Catalans (or traitors if they dissent). Supporters of the movement often try to smear the region’s Spanish-speaking majority as “fascists,” based on weak conspiracy theories about Franco trying to dilute Catalan culture by encouraging immigration from other areas of Spain. In fact, Franco was so worried about working-class Republicans from rural areas moving to big cities like Barcelona that he imposed the national identity card on men who had to move for work before it was required for people who stayed put.

The Catalan separatist movement is self-conciously anti-Francoist. However, it is strange the extent that the abyss has gazed back. Franco made education monolingual in Spanish? The region’s nationalists make it monolingual in Catalan. Franco hated liberal constitutions? So do the Catalan nationalists! Franco held two questionable referendums in 1947 and 1966? The Catalan nationalists have held two questionable referendums in 2014 and 2017, while also claiming that the regional elections of 2015 were a de-facto referendum.

Our story gets stranger still. In 2013, a new party called Vox split from the right of the PP. It was a grouping of hard-right and far-right activists excited by the chance to revive Spanish nationalism. It failed to gain any traction until the Catalan nationalists tried and failed to hold a self-coup based around the questionable referendum of 2017. Vox gained 10.3% of the vote in an inconclusive general election in April 2019 and 15.1% in the follow-up vote in November 2019.

Although the party positions itself against Catalan nationalists, the abyss has stared back. Vox wants to end Spain’s quasi-federal system of 17 autonomous communities, which would be as big a change to Article 2 of the Constitution as anything floated in Barcelona. Vox also wants to ban parties that it deems as unconstitutional, which raises the question of whether it would ban itself. Strangely enough, leaks after a police raid in 2019 on the man who was drafting a new Catalan constitution showed that the nationalist side were also planning to ban unionist parties.

There has been much discussion about how Vox has been able to grow so fast. The COVID-19 pandemic has made talk of antibodies spring to mind. Between 1978 and 2019, Spain didn’t have a single deputy who openly identified as far right. This meant that many of the people who became Vox supporters were unprepared for its narratives - they didn’t have antibodies.

The key words in the previous paragraph are “openly identified.” Many Catalan nationalists are on the far right, even if parties like ERC pretend to be left-wing. CiU pretended to be liberal for many years, only for one of its successor parties to be expelled from the European liberal group in 2018.

Many of my previous posts on the far right apply to Vox. The party seems a little confused about whether society is made up of atomized individuals or collective tribes. Many of its supporters have been softened up by anti-globalist conspiracy-mongering on the internet first. Its voters tend to be men. Many have been drawn to the party by its opposition to feminism; while others are troubled by the maternalistic (or “woke”) left. Others like its defence of traditional religious values and are concerned by Muslim immigration to Spain.

What will happen next? Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez runs a minority coalition with United We Can (Unidas Podemos or UP), a communist-led left-wing populist party. The coalition needs the support of ERC and other populist parties to continue to govern. The coalition has written has shockingly sloppy legislation, including a new consent law, which has led to judges letting some very unsavoury characters out of prison early.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the opposition PP is currently ahead in opinion polls. However, many of its public figures despise Sánchez and his partners. They often hiss accusations of populism at him, while he returns the favour by accusing the conservatives of being a disloyal opposition. I will dig into this issue in more depth in a post scheduled for 7 January.

Although the PP is ahead of the Socialists in the polls, it is still a long way off a majority. The base case looks like a coalition with Vox when an election finally comes in 2023. What concessions would the far right demand in order to let the centre-right govern? We still have some time to find out. However, given the lesson from Nietzsche, we shouldn’t be too surprised if PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo repeats the same mistakes that Sánchez is making by leaning too heavily on populist allies.

Finally, rampant corruption throughout Spain’s boom years from the late 1990s to 2008 remain the joker in the pack. Will there be any further scandals before the election? And, if so, will they move the dial on the opinion polls?

In my experience on social media, Vox supporters are just as irritating as Catalan nationalists. There are only so many posts that one can read from members of the far right claiming not tob be on the far right. Denial isn’t a river in Egypt! I have turned the comments off for the week. Have a great holiday season and see you on Boxing Day!

Further Reading

Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche

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