Small earthquake in Spanish politics. Not many fascists

Why on earth did British journalism get the weekend election in Spain so badly wrong?

Paper after paper, the BBC, Sky and Channel Four News ran dramatic reports in the weeks before, all proclaiming the return of Franquista politics. Ed Stourton even went to the absurd tombstone valley monument to Franco at El Valle de los Caídos (“the Valley of the Fallen”), with the largest crucifix on the planet towering over the graves of men who died thanks to Franco’s attack on democracy in 1936.

The Guardian ran a comment piece by Gordon Brown, proclaiming the return of “Neofascist” politics into the heart of a major European government. There was panic in Gibraltar, as VOX, the far-Right party predicted to enter government after the election, has the same view on the Rock as the IRA has on Northern Ireland. VOX says Gibraltar is British-occupied territory that should be returned to Spain, much as IRA nationalist ideologues insist Britain should quit the north-east corner of Ireland.

But none of this came to pass. The election result was a kind of score draw. VOX flopped badly, losing seats and votes. The Socialists got their biggest ever vote. The Partido Popular (PP), the main conservative party which (together with the iconic socialist prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez) managed a successful transition to democracy and European Community membership in the 1980s, emerged as the biggest party. But, as with David Cameron in 2010 or Theresa May in 2017, the PP does not have an overall majority and cannot govern without a coalition partner.

Even if the deflated VOX entered into an coalition with the PP the alliance would not have a majority to govern. There are smaller, regional parties from Catalonia and the Basque Country the socialist prime Minister Pedro Sanchez may be able to wangle a deal or some sort with a smaller party thought not at the price of breaking apart Spain. 7 Catalan members of the Cortes may offer not to vote against the Socialist government. Their abstention keeps the PP out of power and leave VOX shouting into the wind.

Last autumn, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece and leader of the centre-Right New Democracy Party, gave a talk in fluent English to an audience at the London School of Economics. He was asked if he might contemplate an alliance with one of the small nationalist, right-wing parties that win a few seats under Greece’s proportional representation in the Greek parliament.

He was adamant that he would never enter into any such coalition. His firmness was rewarded in two elections held this spring and summer, when New Democracy won a clear majority twice.

By contrast, the PP leader, the Galician, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, let his party enter into coalition with VOX in two provincial governments. His dalliance with the far-Right has not worked.

That should be a warning to Angela Merkel’s successor, Friedrich Merz, who is desperate to win power in Germany. He has offered regional government coalitions to the far-Right AfD, whom many Germans denounce a neo-Nazis. Merz may come to regret his willingness to get into bed with the nationalist (and often racist) German hard Right.

Europe has many years of far-Right parties emerging, making headlines, and then — when finally entering government — turning out to be useless. In opposition they can make headlines about immigrants, or against LGBTQ rights, denounce the European Union, demand more police and closure of borders. But once in office such crowd-pleasing demagogy is impossible to turn into government practice.

Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni rose to prominence denouncing the EU and calling for referendums on restoring the franc or the lira, but the sad state of Britain since Brexit has done more to boost the EU’s standing as a necessary pillar of governance in all European state than anything any Brussels bigwig has said or done. In order to win votes and be taken seriously, Le Pen and Meloni have had to drop their anti-EU rhetoric.

In her rise to office Giorgia Meloni enjoyed refugee and immigrant-bashing with all the populist enthusiasm of Suella Braverman. But as Prime Minister she has just announced that Italy will open its doors to 425,000 non-EU immigrants, so short is Italy of Italians who can work in the economy.

But the unanswered question remains: Why did our media get Spain so badly wrong? It might be called the Matthew Goodwin syndrome. The Kent professor is now a leader of alt-right political commentary producing books and articles proclaiming the take-over of Britain by what he considers to be alien and unwelcome forces – roughly anyone who is caught reading the Economist or Guardian and doesn’t take Nigel Farage seriously.

Professor Godwin came to fame in 2015 writing columns in The Times and Financial Times arguing that the populist Right would sweep into Parliament, with at least five UKIP MPs arriving in Westminster.

In fact UKIP flopped, as Nigel Farage had at every election he fought to become a UK legislator. Everyone enjoyed his exaggerations or fabulations about Brussels, but no-one wanted him within a country kilometer of actually making any laws that would affect Britain.

Goodwin continued to write that the far-Right were growing in power in Europe, but each time one of his favoured parties won regional or even sometimes national office, they turned out to be incompetent and were soon booted out.

It is not that Europe is turning Left, though Sanchez in Spain, Scholz in Germany and soon perhaps Starmer in Britain suggest that sensible centre-Left reformist politicians can head governments. But the idea so popular in the British press that Europe is on an irresistible, inevitable, irreversible glidepath to extremist rightist politics is not true.

European politics is a mosaic, not a monolith. It is messy, contradictory, confusing, ever-shifting. The ultra-EU evangelists like Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian liberal, may shout “More Europe” from any rooftop. Yet Europe still remains a partnership of 27 sovereign nations, sharing some limited power, but all 27 PMs are committed to strengthening their nation states.

The London commentariat who announced the resurrection of Franco in Spain have been proved wrong. They were in good company, as there is a sensual pleasure in writing of such a dramatic change. But Europe’s politics is more prosaic. More about fixes than fascism.

Denis MacShane is a former minister of Europe.

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