So yesterday the right in Spain, although they are trying to frame it again as more neutral and constitutionalist, gathered for a sunny morning walk in Barcelona to protest against Pedro Sánchez and the upcoming amnesty deal with Puigdemont. Like at every other march, the organisers, this time a group called SCC, claimed 300,000 attendees, but the local police reckoned far fewer, at 50,000. It matters not. A few streets in the centre of Barcelona for a couple of hours, with lots of flags, certainly enough to fill social media and papers and the lunchtime news a bit with colourful images and claim success.
Beyond the usual cries, though, and the tribal group hug with everyone feeling a bit better afterwards, what was the point? How are they going to stop Sánchez like that, if that is really their goal? Somebody on the right, I think, needs to come up with some new frames and a better strategy.
“Defending our principles”, for example, which is a common conservative cry. “Defend” is a frame, a way of looking at things, of talking about the whole. “Defend” means someone feels attacked, so then we’re talking about conflict, with some other side, some antagonist or enemy force, not a friend or a partner. And if we’re defending, we must build defences of some sort, amd close gates and hold to who we are and to what we really believe in and somehow heroically reject the other side’s repeated moves against our castle.
Or take the way Federico Jiménez Losantos opened his Sunday article in Libertad Digital this week: “On October 8, 2023, something much more important than a march is taking place in Barcelona”, he wrote: “This is the beginning of Spain’s resistance against Sánchez…”. What is he talking about? The right has been resisting against Sánchez for the entirety of the last five years. The whole extended multi-level election campaign this spring and summer was fought and argued against Sánchez, against what they call Sanchismo. They hate him. It was very personal, very intense, even nasty.
And everybody already just voted in July. Despite conservative pollsters and pundits promising politicians and voters that the right would win more or less resoundlingly with enough MPs for a majority PP-Vox coalition, voters across the country thought otherwise, and returned slightly more left-wing and regional separatist MPs than conservative or far-right ones. Unless it somehow now goes to a repeat general election in January, the result is 178-172 in the 350-seat lower chamber.
Are Feijóo and Abascal and whoever it is left in Ciudadanos going to spend the next four years railing against Sánchez, all the time? Another four years of resistance to Sanchismo? When voters have just demonstrated to them that, on the whole, which is what counts in a democracy, those are not arguments that convince enough people, even after all of that intense, repetitive, very personal propaganda.
Will someone on the right do some actual thinking about how to frame it all in a different manner, about how to shift away from feeling attacked and thus needing to defend, and perhaps even come up with a constructive strategy for convincing more voters the next time round? Something borne of conservative values and principles, of course, but something that at least suggests some kind of better future for the whole country, and not just a nationalist fantasy version of it.
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