Progressives in Britain can still triumph if they look to Spain’s success

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/22/progressives-britain-ape-spain-coalition-rule-pedro-sanchez

Version 1 of 2.

The Valley of the Fallen, 40 miles outside Madrid, is Franco’s grandiloquent attempt to memorialise the Spanish civil war to his advantage. Thirty thousand dead from both sides are buried in the valley anonymously but with two great problems: the bodies of Republican anti-fascist soldiers are there without their or their family’s permission. And the only two graves marked are those of Francisco Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the fascist Falangist party.

Now the new Spanish socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, proposes to disinter Franco’s grave and turn the valley into a deconsecrated mausoleum for victims of fascism. It is a proposal of immense symbolism for Spain and Europe. Rather than portray the Spanish civil war as a national convulsion triggered sadly but necessarily by the fascists – the ambition when designing the valley – Sánchez, backed by the overwhelming majority of Spaniards, is declaring fascism beyond the pale. Its leaders should not be honoured with the only named graves, but instead buried anywhere other than the valley.

Consider this part of Spain’s desire to become a modern country in the front rank of European states – and the socialist party’s poll ratings are soaring.

Corbyn is not so much locked in the 1940s, as his critics claim, but 2012

Sánchez is a deft political craftsman, ousting his predecessor Mariano Rajoy, mired in a corruption scandal, six weeks ago by skilfully building a cross-party coalition to win a parliamentary no-confidence vote. He now rides an economic recovery that allows him to talk of redistributing wealth and rebuilding Spain’s social contract – even while investing in skills and science to such an extent that Spain is being nicknamed the Germany of the south.

The dark days of 2012 when Spain, like Greece, had to sue for an enormous credit line to stop its stricken banking system from going under are far away. Yet the financial crisis and the dramatic country bailouts still define the way Britain and its left thinks about the EU – an important reason why Corbyn’s performance during the referendum campaign was so half-hearted and why even now he is unlikely to reproduce Sánchez’s political daring to trigger and win a no-confidence vote on the calamity of a no-deal Brexit. Similarly, Portugal and Ireland were two other witnesses for the anti-EU case.

Spool forward several years and the story is rather different. No referendum on leaving the EU would be won in rapidly recovering Greece (yet to repay a euro of debt and about to exit the debt relief economic programme), Portugal, Ireland or Spain. In their different ways, each is a success story.

All are in the hands of progressive governments of different hues; all would have gone under without the 2011/12 bailouts, avoiding a 1930s-style bank collapse and European depression; all are stronger for the pain they have been through; and all are now enjoying a strong economic recovery and growing influence within the EU to which they are committed.

The EU has been a change agent for the better, allowing each country to resist the rise of rightwing, populist, anti-immigrant illiberalism, marked by the likes of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Sebastian Kurz in Austria and Matteo Salvini in Italy.

It isn’t convenient for Britain’s left Eurosceptics, but liberal social democracy can flourish in Europe, and it’s doing so. None of these progressive, charismatic leaders talks of transforming capitalism built on yesteryear’s slogans or of building a radical left social movement offering an at a stroke quasi-revolutionary programme.

Instead, they find powerful national symbols – the Valley of the Fallen or the case for gay marriage, as in Ireland – around which they build broad-based coalitions embodying progressive values. Rather than fostering anti-EU sentiments to assuage nationalist forces, they use the EU to reinforce and underpin their progressive position.

Thus Antónia Costa, Portugal’s socialist prime minister, heads a broad coalition that includes the far left, communists and greens but is turbo-charging the foundational reforms of the last 20 years that have stimulated investment, innovation and skills. Within the EU framework, he has strained to relieve austerity and been rewarded with strong growth. Portugal is an economic success – proof positive that the left in coalition can govern well and the EU is not a neoliberal plot. It foretells where Greece and Spain can follow.

In Britain, alas, coalition building in and outside parliament is not for Corbyn’s Labour party. He is not so much locked in the 1940s, as his critics claim, but 2012. In truth, British reporting of how Germany, the EU and IMF were treating eurozone economies was relentlessly negative. Every true Brit could unite in the view that Greece, Portugal and Spain were being nailed to the cross of austerity by the prison guards of EU economic imperialism. It was all grist to the Eurosceptic mill.

This allowed the running of an argument on the left: thank God that Britain was not involved in the euro, locking a whole continent into neoliberalism, unemployment and destitution. Unless the heartless eurocrats cancelled its foreign debts immediately, Greece should revert to the drachma, devalue, default and buccaneer its way forward as an independent country – just as Britain could and would. The prospect that the crisis countries were in some way responsible for their plight and that good might emerge from belt-tightening in return for debt forgiveness was anathema. Yet so it has proved.

Britain may not have a Valley of the Fallen around whose reform we can coalesce and build a progressive coalition – but we do have Brexit. This is now nakedly the cause of English nationalists, whose marginalisation requires the broadest of progressive coalitions. Call it, perhaps, a new popular front. Only thus can a people’s vote be won and victory consolidated. The left must be the animating component – but it does mean thinking in coalition terms. Hard left “go it alone” purism is a blind alley. Time for us to think and act like Europeans.