While it is tempting to read ongoing events as an authoritarian lapse, this interpretation remains incomplete. More than a simple throwback to Spain’s past, the Catalan crisis presents an ominous vision for the future: one in which the reconfiguration of the state takes place along reactionary and punitive lines. Spanish nationalism has become a vehicle for this endeavor, galvanizing the right and presenting a critical challenge for left and progressive forces. But it is, by its nature, incapable of producing a stable political outcome. As long as symbols of national unity remain cudgels in the hands of the Spanish right, disarray will persist. [...]
Maurice Duverger once remarked that just as people are conditioned by their childhoods, political parties are defined by their origins. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s Partido Popular (PP), which governs with support from the center-right Ciudadanos (C’s), owes its existence to Franco’s longtime information minister, Manuel Fraga. In the late sixties Fraga realized the regime could not outlive Franco, so he pressed its modernizing cadres to accept a democratic transition after the dictator’s death. With the dictatorship’s structures still in place and the left too weak to topple them, elites from both sides negotiated a restoration of democracy, with the regime insiders managing to maintain the initiative throughout the process. Established opinion hailed it as a paradigmatic success. [...]
The “Spanish exception” to the rising tide of xenophobia in Europe, therefore, only begins to make sense when one takes into account that the PP represents a sizable number of hard-right voters. More importantly, the kind of xenophobia that in other European countries articulates along a native–foreign “other” axis in Spain is harnessed along center–periphery lines—a reflection of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “anomalous and self-contained” nature of the country. Anti-immigrant rhetoric is not a leading plank of the PP’s platform—but it is not a coincidence that its most xenophobic politicians often come from Catalonia and the Basque Country, where they would otherwise have very little to offer right-wing voters. Indeed Badalona, the only large Catalan municipality recently governed by the PP (in 2011–‘15), became ground zero for a Le Pen-style experiment under the mayorship of Xavier García-Albiol, now the leader of the PP in Catalonia. Xenophobia lurks not far beneath the surface, ready to be weaponized if more traditional demagogy fails. [...]
C’s originates from Barcelona, where it was founded twelve years ago as a center-left party opposed to Catalan nationalism. Led by Albert Rivera, a young and charismatic former banker, it was catapulted onto the national stage in 2015. Following Podemos’ success, it positioned itself as a “safer” alternative to established politics. Like Emmanuel Macron in France, Rivera repeatedly defines himself as “neither left nor right.” Ideological vagueness has long been a part of the party’s approach: during the 2009 European elections it ditched its pro-EU platitudes and progressive credentials to join a Eurosceptic right-wing coalition.
