Spain’s once mighty socialists succumb to populist rage
The socialist party in Spain is set to lose to a center-right party and a far left party.
The leader of Spain’s Socialist party is busy travelling the country, giving speeches and interviews, smiling, rallying, hugging and doing all the other things politicians do in an election campaign. Yet the confidence is gone, as is the requisite optimism. If the polls are right, Mr Sánchez is on course to lead his party to yet another painful defeaton June 26.
This time, however, Spain’s Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) looks likely to be beaten not just by the centre-right Popular party but also by the far-left Unidos Podemos movement. According to recent surveys, the once mighty PSOE will come a distant third in this month’s general election, with just 20 per cent of the vote. Not only will it not lead the next government. Barring an unlikely late surge, it will not even lead the Spanish left.
The decline of the PSOE is, of course, part of a broader story. In Germany, the Social Democrats are polling around historic lows, as are the French Socialists under their unpopular president. Pasok has turned into a splinter group in the Greek parliament. In the UK, meanwhile, the venerable Labour party has undergone something of a reverse takeover, and is currently led by a politician who spent his entire career on the party’s leftist fringe. With few exceptions — Italy being the most obvious — the European centre-left finds itself in the midst of a long and painful retreat.
The Spanish case is interesting for two reasons. The first is that the PSOE has played an outsized role in national politics since the end of the Franco dictatorship, ruling Spain for 21 out of 39 years. That success reflects not least the fact that Spanish society tends towards the left: polls consistently find that the average voter is slightly left of centre. More than 32 per cent of respondents in a recent CIS poll identified as Socialists, Social Democrats or Progressives — while only 18 per cent referred to themselves as Conservatives or Christian Democrats. If the Socialists can’t make it here, can they make it anywhere?