Europe Moving from Monolith to Mosaic Politics with Palette of Parties for Voters to Choose From

            Alicante: The conventional wisdom in much of the London commentariat is that Europe is sliding ineluctably to the right as xenophobic, nationalist,  Europhobe culture war parties like the Braverman-Truss wing of the Conservative Party drag political culture to the nasty hard rightist, often racist end of the political spectrum.

            It is true that 20^th century European politics  based on giant monolithic centre-right or centre-left parties with little room for left-over 19^th century Liberals has all but vanished.

            We now see palette or mosaic politics as voters are willing to give transient support to various parties on the right or left, or single issue causes like the Greens or the nationalist parties in Catalonia, the Basque country, or Scotland. In Scotland, the SNP are fading and in Switzerland,  green MPs were defeated in last month’s election to the Swiss federal parliament.  

            Voters have also recently removed from government the anti-EU, anti-women, homophobe Law and Justice party in Poland. 

            Now the hopes of the European right and their press followers in London like the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Spectator that Spain would revert to rightwing rule are fading.

            Spanish conservatives in the Partido Popular (People’s Party PP) hoped to dislodge  the Socialist government headed by Pedro Sanchez earlier this year by relying on  an arrangement with VOX, the rabidly right-wing party which reeks of Francoism. It was too much for Spain’s moderate centrist voters who refused to give the PP and VOX  a majority in July.

            They also refused to give Sanchez an overall  majority and he can only govern with the support of six Catalan deputies who belong to the most rabidly secessionist of the spectrum of Catalan independentista parties.

            Their leader Carlos Puigdemont headed the Catalan administration in 2017. He  annnounced Catalonia would quit Spain and sought to get his decision approved by a referendum.

            Under the Spanish constitution only the nation's Parliament (Cortes) in Madrid and elected government can hold a referendum to break up the state.

            This was rejected by the Cortes in which Catalan MPs sit just as SNP MPs sit in the House of Commons.

            Puigdemont, a  demagogue, whipped up a protest movement which quickly turned into attacks on the police, arrests and some of his supporters facing prison sentences.

            He scarpered across the border in the boot of  a car to save his skin rather than stay alongside his comrades he had led into such a disastrous dead-end confrontation rejected across the political spectrum south of the Pyrenees. 

            That was then. Six years later Sanchez needs Puigdemont’s six deputies to have a majority to be invested as prime minister.

            The anti-Socialist right and their press are denouncing Sanchez for dealing with Puigdemont and saying any amnesty for the illegal acts he encouraged in 2017 is the end of constitutional democracy in Spain.

            Yet Spanish Conservatives promoted the Pacto del Olvido (the Pact of Forgetting) to turn a blind eye to crimes committed under Franco after Spain transitioned to democracy in the 1970s and Tony Blair, with the support of all British MPs, offered amnesties to get the Northern Ireland peace deal to work. The Sanchez amnesty proposals for arrests during a political spasm in part of Spain six years ago while messy are part of the normal trade of politics in any democracy. Many socialists are unhappy as is the grand old man of the Spanish left, Felipe Gonazalez. He calls for a German style grand coalition of left and right but the PP only want to discredit and destroy Sanchez and PSOE.

            It is hard for the PP and the Spanish right to insist that Catalans must respect the unity of Spain and accept the Spanish constitution while denying the right of six of their duly elected representatives to make transparent deals with another party.

            Sanchez has also handed out financial inducements including a renewal of Catalonia’s regional railway network and other financial goodies.

            Talking to a wider range of government, PP, and balanced journalists in Spain last week I found no-one who thought Sanchez could be stopped by the noisy PP protests which have included demonstration outside PSOE party headquarters in Madrid and protests outside socialist MP’s offices.

            If in 2024 Sir Keir Starmer joins Pedro Sanchez as a Labour Prime Minister it will mean nine European nations are headed by governments of the democratic left with a further three having social democratic deputy prime ministers.

            The idea that all of Europe is turning sharply to the right doesn’t make sense but it won’t stop the line being peddled by our mono-lingual London pundits and media.

Denis MacShane is the former Minister of Europe. He writes on European politics and appears regularly on French television and radio on politics.