A bomb has gone off in Spanish politics. On 12 June, a police report alleged that senior figures in the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) were involved in a vast corruption scheme. One of the alleged ringleaders was Santos Cerdán, a Socialist deputy who until recently served as the party’s Secretary of Organization – the right-hand man to President Pedro Sánchez – and was responsible for various high-level political operations, such as securing the current governing agreement with the Catalan independentists. Also in the firing line was José Luis Ábalos, the former transport minister, and his advisor Koldo García. All three are accused of organizing a conspiracy to collect illegal commissions linked to state contracts. They have been charged with bribery, influence peddling and membership of a criminal enterprise.
Given the seniority of those implicated and the lurid details about their spending habits – including escort services and luxury apartments, freely discussed on a series of leaked tape recordings – the impact on the government has been seismic. The police are currently investigating a number of businessmen, former civil servants and political aides. The opposition Partido Popular (PP), which now leads PSOE in the polls, has insisted that the government has become a ‘mafia’. Sánchez may have to call a snap election, which would create an opening for the PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to form a coalition with the far-right Vox.
Spain has been rocked by periodic corruption crises ever since the country’s transition to democracy in the 1970s. The PSOE President Felipe González was defeated at the polls in 1996 after a series of explosive charges were made against his government, ranging from the use of para-state violence against Basque independence forces to irregular party financing through front organizations. In 2018, Sánchez came to power in the wake of the so-called Gürtel plot, in which dozens of PP officials – including then President Mariano Rajoy – faced allegations of bribery, money laundering and tax evasion. Virtually every autonomous community and major regional institution has had to deal with its own corruption scandal, reproducing on a smaller scale what has become a structural feature of the regime.
Though the nature of these crises is variable, there is also a common thread: each has occurred in the end-days of a governing project whose principal value is ‘stability’. González’s PSOE had ruled for thirteen years, during which time it had carried out the neoliberal modernization of the country by integrating it fully into the EU and demolishing the trade unions. Rajoy’s PP, in power since 2011, succeeded in containing the anti-austerity 15M movement and in defeating the pro-independence uprising in Catalonia. Both leaders managed, over the course of their premierships, to neutralize an outside threat to the political order. Having succeeded in this mission, their administrations increasingly turned inward and descended into greed and infamy, before being replaced by new ones which restabilized the situation.
It is worth asking what this sequence tells us about Sánchez’s PSOE – now ruling in a coalition with the left-wing Sumar – as a party that set itself the historic mission of defeating the far right and locking it out of government. Superficially, it might seem as though the current scandal simply replicates these previous cycles: the success of a stabilizing project leading to a period of decadence, which in turn paves the way for the official opposition – in this case the PP – to come to power and restore ‘normality’. But there are signs that this crisis is of a different order, and may lead to a much larger shift in Spanish political life.
To understand this potential realignment, we must consider how Sánchez’s government has sustained itself so far: the electoral coalition it assembled and the forces that would stand to gain from its downfall. The nature of PSOE’s political strategy is particularly apparent in its approach to international affairs. The party leadership knows that the global landscape is increasingly unfavourable to its form of soft social democracy, and that it lacks sufficiently strong alliances to exert any real influence on the world stage. In their absence, its foreign policy positions are mostly gestural. It has supported proposals to end Israel’s preferential agreements with the EU; it describes what is happening in Gaza as a genocide; and it has engaged in continual diplomatic crossfire with the Zionist state. Sánchez has also rejected NATO’s demand to hike defence spending to 5% of GDP and clashed with Trump over the issue. Yet, at the same time, PSOE has ignored the popular mobilizations calling for it to sever relations with Israel and end its involvement in the arms trade. Despite his tussle with the White House, Sánchez has already increased military spending by more than any other president of the democratic period.
Such contradictions reflect the logic of progressivism in the age of ‘hyperpolitics’ – a era in which political rhetoric is increasingly unmoored from material realities. PSOE has tried to use symbolic statements to compensate for its political weakness, in the hope that this performance will keep the far right at bay: appealing to younger voters horrified by the slaughter in Gaza and liberals appalled by the rise of right-populism, whether abroad or at home. Such tactics have served to keep Sánchez in office, despite his failure to fulfil the electoral promises that got him there: neither repealing neoliberal labour laws, nor lifting draconian restrictions on social activism, nor getting a grip on the spiralling cost of housing.
They have succeeded in part because of the legacies of political polarization passed down from the dictatorship. The rise of Vox represents the resurgence of a militant Francoism which has terrified many progressives, prompting them to unify around PSOE. This is especially important when it comes to the country’s mosaic of national-separatist parties, who seek independence for the Basque Country and Catalonia. While some of these actors are deeply conservative, and all are committed to breaking with the Spanish state, they have nonetheless decided to prop up Sánchez’s administration – aware that a right-wing government coalition of the PP and Vox would seek to crush regional autonomy and reassert the authority of the central government.
The progressive bloc has also been sustained by its voter base. PSOE is both a bourgeois and working-class party: counting on the support of large companies, the professional classes who have benefited from the rise of the service sector, unionized workers – except perhaps in Euskadi and Galicia – and those with lower income and education levels. This broad constituency has more or less hung together thanks to a period of relative economic stabilization. Although inflation has risen and living standards are squeezed, European funds have also led to progress in certain sectors, with more public jobs for university graduates and an overall expansion of waged employment, bringing the unemployment rate down to 10% from its peak of 26% during the post-crash period. While this has hardly corrected the deep inequalities of Spanish society, it has given progressive voters some incentive to maintain support for the government.
Yet this model based on class compromise is fragile, in that it involves keeping such popular groups politically pliant. The progressive government’s incorporation of the professional wing of the 15M generation into the ‘expanded state’, plus the conversion of the big trade unions into an appendage of the government – through the Labour Ministry’s corporatist policies – may have so far kept unrest to a minimum. But, over the long term, this threatens to undermine PSOE’s stated aim of debarring the far right from high office. For an economy in which state investment is managed by private capital, in which civil-service jobs are doled out to graduates while half of the population continues to work in precarious conditions, is an ideal breeding ground for the likes of Vox, which is consistently polling between 13% and 15%.
Although Vox draws much of its support from the older middle classes – addled by culture wars, galvanized by nationalist-Catholic discourses and nostalgic for the Franco era – it is now attempting to expand into poorer demographics. The latter may well decide that PSOE’s gestural politics are not enough and that a real alternative is needed. It is the natural role of the left to offer one, but none of its organizations is currently up to the task. While it has taken a radical turn since leaving government, Podemos remains ineffectual and unpopular, while Sumar, which has supplanted Podemos as the main electoral alliance of the Spanish left, is a moderate and technocratic outfit, uninterested in mobilizing against the status quo.
In this vacuum, the current corruption scandal could catalyse the reactionary tendencies which are already embedded in Spanish political culture. As in Brazil and Argentina, corruption is an issue that the right can easily exploit – exposing the hypocrisy of progressive forces which stake their claims to legitimacy on symbolic displays of virtue. By spreading demoralization, it could undermine PSOE’s passive support among the aforementioned groups, who may well decide to stay home when elections are next called. It could also allow the right to penetrate popular sectors which the centre left has largely neglected: the PP and Vox are already striving to convince Latin American migrants that the PSOE embodies a destructive Bolivarian-style socialism. For this reason, the downfall of Cerdán and his cronies could be more consequential than the scandals of the 1990s or 2010s: setting the stage for the collapse of Sánchez’s stabilizing project and the far right’s eventual entry to government.
This will not be a linear process, and the government may still be able to survive over the coming months. In the medium term, the PP has every chance of winning an election with the backing of Vox, at which point its centre-right elements will likely try to rein in their far-right partners and assert their own hegemony. Yet any such attempt to resuscitate the old two-party system, with centre-right and centre-left alternating in power, will come up against the ongoing decay of the mass politics that underpinned it. We are now in the twilight of Spain’s progressive cycle, and it is the radical right that stands to benefit.
Read on: Brais Fernandez, ‘The Spanish Impasse’, Sidecar.