An inglorious victory for the Socialist Party THERE HAS hardly been a national election in recent times in Western Europe where a ruling party has had such a clear field as the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) did in the parliamentary elections of June 22.
Its only rival on the left were the splinters of a shattered and discredited Communist Party. On the right, it faced shipwrecked bourgeois centrists trying to find a new footing and the rightist rearguard led by Fraga Iribarne. GERRY FOLEY
In this context, the big victory of the PSOE so celebrated in much of the international capitalist press was not so glorious. Combate, the paper of the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria (Spanish state section of the Fourth International), commented in its June 23 issue:
"The victory of the PSOE on June 22 is politically much weaker than the one in 1982 [when it came to power]. Then it was based on the strength of the illusions that the overwhelming majority of the left had in its promise of 'change.' In these last elections, it was based on the force of disillusion, resignation and the lack of alternatives, in the political framework created by the defeat of the referendum against NATO on May 12. It is true that about nine million people voted for the PSOE to make sure that 'everything stays the same' - a number similar to the pro-NATO vote in the referendum.
"But it is not all going to stay the same. The PSOE thinks that it holds two trump cards for continuing the road of modernizing Spanish capitalism - which has been built on the basis of unemployment, attacks on social welfare, political repression and corruption in public administration. One is sustained and stable economic recovery. The other is the weakening, marginalization and dispersion of the social movements.
"In all probability they will lose their first trump at some point during the life of the next parliament, when the expected recession in the international capitalist economy hits. ... As for the second, that will have to be decided, and we will see who wins.
It is not the parliamentary relationship of forces that will decide that. It will be decided by the capacity and determination to struggle of the social movements, in particular their more militant, tenacious and imaginative sections."
The lack of enthusiasm for the PSOE was pointed up by the fact that where there were alternatives, they stole the social democrats' thunder. In the Basque country, the revolutionary nationalists who call for an independent Basque state, Herri Batasuna, made major gains. The same was true of the very tepid nationalists in Catalonia, the CiU. In Andalucia, the IU slate [United left, dominated by the official CP], headed by the charismatic and heterodox former Communist mayor of Cordoba, Julio Anguita, rolled up an impressive score, getting about 20 per cent of the vote. Revolutionary nationalists gain ground
The PSOE vote went down a bit in the part of the Basque nation included in the Basque Autonomous Area. But the big loser was the bourgeois Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which has been in a pact with the antinationalist PSOE. For the first time it got a minority of the nationalist vote, and found the revolutionary nationalists of Herri Batasuna gaining on it.
The Euzkadiko Ezkerra group also increased its vote significantly. It has .its origin in ETA [the Basque revolutionary nationalist movement], but moved to the right in the name of
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BELGIUM seeking socialist political solutions.
In Navarra, historically a Basque area not included in the Basque Autonomous Area, the PNV collapsed, and Herri Batasuna went way out ahead as the major nationalist and left party in the province.
The Basque section of the LCR, the Liga Komunista Iraultzailea [LKI -Revolutionary Communist League] campaigned independently for a vote for Herri Batasuna. Combate commented:
"We feel especially happy to have contributed even modestly to the electoral success of Herri Batasuna, which was without doubt the best news of these elections."
Combate attributed the success of the official CP-dominated coalition in Andalucia mainly to the charisma of Anguita "who treated his fellow candidates, in particular those of the PCPE [Moscow loyalists returning to the fold of the official party] with Olympian disdain."
As for the IU results overall, the LCR paper said:
*The IU's results are poor in them- The Is results are poor in themselves and in comparison with what the PCE [Communist Party of Spain] got in 1982, which was a disastrous vote."
Moreover, the PCE failed to achieve its "central objective," which was "to make the IU the political expression of the anti-NATO vote in the referendum. . . . Here there are two fundamental aspects. The first is that the IU with its 930,000 votes cannot seriously claim to represent more than a section of the movement." Secondly, "the IU's seven deputies ... will be in a poor position to manipulate movements that were not born yesterday, and whose objectives, organizations and traditions of mobilization have little to do with the IU, except for the Workers Commissions, which is a special problem."
Overall, Combate wrote, the election results confirmed the decision of the LCR to call for a boycott outside the Basque country:
"All calculations indicate that about four million of the anti-NATO voters were to the left of the PSOE. The slates that placed themselves in this camp however got less than 2 million votes on June 22. Even assuming that the PSOE regained a lot of these votes, it is clear that many hundreds of thousands of people in the anti-NATO movement opted for abstention, and a part of them -the number is hard to estimate, but it must be large - abstained for the same reasons we did, that is that none of the slates outside the Basque country deserved militant and radical votes, and this time the conditions did not exist to offer an effective alternative." 6