Absolute majority for the
workers parties in Spain
Gerry FOLEY The results of the October 28 Spanish elections confirmed the dramatic class polarization that has been shaping up in the country.
Since this is a process going on in the society as a whole, the vote count produced no surprises. It was almost exactly what all the informed observers expected.
The great majority of the working-class voters backed the only immediate alternative they saw for a working-class government, the Socialist Party. The SP got 201 seats, an absolute majority, and 46% of the popular vote.
The next largest party, the Alianza Popular (People's Alliance) got only about half as many votes as the SP, 25.3%. But it was the second biggest winner in the elections, increasing its vote from a mere 6.1% in the last parliamentary elections in 1979:
The Alianza is the party of the hard right, politicians directly compromised by their relationship with the Francoist dietatorship. It is not too unfriendly to the putschist sentiment in the military.
In the first bourgeois democratic elections in Spain since the civil war, in June 1976, after Franco's death, the AP represented Francoism and was swamped. The bourgeois politicians who stood for parliamentary government and liberalization won.
In this election, the alternative of 'normal' bourgeois parliamentary rule was reduced to rubble. The governing Democratic Center Union had already split before the election. The two pieces together got barely 10% of the vote.
The larger group that maintained the old name got 7.2%; the Social Democratic Center, headed by the first post-Francoist premier Suarez got a mere 2.2%.
The other main loser in the elections. logically enough, was the party that had put the biggest stake on the stabilization of normal bourgeois parliamentary rule — the Communist Party. The strongest opposition party in the years of the dietatorship, the main force in the underground workers movement, got a mere 3.8% of the vote and five seats in parliament.
In fact, the CP was already effectively marginalized in the 1976 elections, in which the SP gained a commanding lead as the main electoral party of the working class.
In 1976, the SP managed to look to the left of the CP, which was bending 8 over backward to prove to the Spanish bourgeoisie that it could be trusted as a housebroken parliamentary party. The CP stressed the need to support the bourgeois politicians leading the democratization. Felipe Gonzalez, leader of the PSOE (DR).
The SP, however, was more concerned with competing with the bourgeois parties for a stronger role in parliament. Therefere, it posed itself, to some extent, as an alternative to them.
The perspective of stabilizing parliamentary democracy essentially foundered international economic crisis, which knocked the pins out from under the rapid economic development of the and 1970s that led the Spanish bourgeoisie to go over to parliamentary forms of rule.
Even the boom had not produced anything like a decent life for most of the working people in the Spanish state. The onset of the world economic crisis revived
In this situation, the CP was torn apart by its attempts to demonstrate its acceptability as a parliamentary party and to take its distance from Moscow. The EuroCommunist leadership gave up their traditional dogmatic armor without being able to offer the ranks of the party any gains or credible perspective to replace
The one place that the CP had major electoral strength, in Catalonia, it suffered an important split in the year preceeding these elections, with the formation of the PCC last spring.
In fact, the party fell so deeply into disarray that the Workers Commissions, the country's largest labor confederation, which it built and almost totally controlled, did not back the CP's campaign. The prostration of the CP, for the moment, has created a new situation of relative political fluidity in the Workers Commissions, and this is likely to be a factor in the recomposition of leadership in the factories in the coming class confrontations
The CP leaders explained their rout at the polls by saying that the voters subordinated all other considerations to getting a different kind of government and therefore voted for the SP as the biggest opposition party.
But in a parliamentary system, the eclipse of the CP was not an automatic result of the fact that it could not offer any credible perspective of forming a CP government. It was big enough to offer a political alternative by voting for an SP government in parliament and then putting pressure on it. But there was no point in complicating things by voting for the CP, when it did not offer any proposals substantially to the left of those of the SP.
In its November 5 issue, Combate, the central organ of the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria, the section of the Fourth International for the Spanish state, com-
"The CP's disaster followed a campaign in which the party activists gave everything they had, the last peseta, the an enthusiasm deserving of a better cause. What is more, the ultramoderate policy of the SP left a lot of space on its left that the CP did not try to fill, although it certainly could
"In reality, the CP's electoral disaster is another demonstration of its crisis of strategy and leadership. It has lost all credibility as a party of struggle, even among broad sections of its own ranks. Very few people thought that a strong CP would be a 'guarantee that the SP will not move to the right.""
The Partit dels Comunistas de Catalunya (PCC - Party of Communists of Catalonia), which was formed in April on the basis of about half the CP members in Catalonia, got 1.3% of the Catalan votes. This new formation represented a combination of conscious left currents in the CP, Moscow loyalists, and a confused combination of both. It was generally identified by the mass media as a "pro-Soviet" party. COnst electoral campaigns combate
Combat said:
"This was a poor result for a party that includes the most militant sector of the Catalan workers movement. We imagine that there will be a discussion in the party on the balance sheet. We hope that the outcome will be a strengthening of the commitment to struggle and mobilisation that gave rise to the PCC, not a step backward, nor a reinforcement of the line of claiming that it is the party, which has been coming from the leadership.
"The result of these elections, as well as the experiences and most recent period strengthen our conviction that a revolutionary alternative able to compete with the reformists can only be built in Catalonia and in the rest of the Spanish state on the basis of the unity in action of all revolutionaries. Catalonia would probably not have elected any deputies this time. Such a campaign would have been overshadowed by polarization and count. But it still would have been a very important help for continuing the struggle after election is the important thing."
The LCR participated in far-left coalitions in Madrid and in Catalonia. In both cases these united slates received token vote, 5,000 in Catalonia and 3,700
As for Madrid and Catalonia, Combate commented: "The results are not very different from what we expected, but we still cannot say that we are happy with
Many case, whatever the limitations of these campaigns, they were valuable experiences. We hope those who participated with us will draw the same conclusion and continue and stengthen this
"Our general conclusion from the campaign is that even in those areas where there was a coalition or where we stood alone without asking people to vote for us, this approach of unity in action must be extended and strengthened in the coming months." (In a number of areas, the LCR alone or with other forces ran token campaigns in order to get its ideas out and then withdrew shortly before the the LCR participated in the Esquerra Unida del Pais Valencia coalition which got 10,000 votes, or 0.5%.
With respect to the results in Valencia, Combate said: "The Valencia United Left is a very specific case because a unitedfront of action has been established there for some time. It was a campaign whose importance went beyond Valencia as a test of the possibility of such fronts and the usefulness of such campaigns. The campaign was obstructed by the severe floods that hit the region. So, the results were modest but they have to be seen in comparison with these difficulties."
In the Basque country, the LCR called for a vote for Herri Batasuna (the People revolutionary nationalist party. The HB increased its vote significantly from 192,000 in the elections for the new Basque local authority, in which it could be expected to do better than in an all-Spain general election, to 206,700.
Although the opposition to the instittutions of the Spanish state is greatest in the Basque country, the pressure of the demand for a general alternative was also 463,200. For the first time, the SP the campaign
Nonetheless, parties out. Basque development struggle. Herri Batasuna.
course, this process must be led by the working class. From the all-Spanish state left parties we ask solidarity in this strug gle, and we will reciprocate.
"For us, what the LKI has done here is a principled approach to the problem of the nationalities, and we are pleased with
The results for the individual LCR-LKI candidates are not yet available as we go to press.
The tensions created immediately after assassination of the elections by the
General Victor Lago Roman, commander of the Madrid garrison, the politically key the tion)
results placed
"But equally an right stress of indepenof lent any his electoral into lost before the lary govern-
9