SPAIN: Aznar Claims The Middle Ground As Key To Sunday Election Win

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Mar 1 1996 (IPS) - To win the centre and Sunday’s elections, Popular Party (PP) leader Jose Maria Aznar must lay low the ghost of former dictator Francisco Franco, just as, fifteen years before, socialist Felipe Gonzalez did with the memory of Karl Marx.

The clear majority of Spaniards reject political extremism, and place themselves on the centre left. Part of this is the legacy of the Civil War (1936-39) and the reaction against Franco himself, in power for four decades thereafter. But it is a reality recognised by the all the candidates.

By 1979 the Spanish Workers Socialist Party (PSOE) under Gonzalez, noting the political trend, was letting it be known that he disapproved of the PSOE’s ‘marxist’ tag at private meetings with journalists.

The party congress voted in favour of retaining the marxist link and Gonzalez resigned as secretary general. In the struggle that followed Gonzalez won the day, shedding Marx, though promising he would retain marxism as a key term of reference.

From that moment on he moved to retake control of the party machinery, and Marx was never again invoked as the inspirer of anything, as far as his PSOE was concerned. In fact there was very little of the old man in the PSOE’s economic policies in power, which were distinctly neo-liberal in hue.

Now Aznar is completing a similar volte-face with the PP, but this time from the right to the centre. He held his own private session with key journalists on Feb. 26 from the daily El Mundo and used it to confirm his view of Franco as a dictator whose rule had been profoundly negative for Spain.

He now denies the existence of a classic right and left political split, and declaring that Spain needs to be governed from the centre, with centrist attitudes and a centrist policy.

The daily ABC’s influential political reporter Isabel San Sebastian asked Aznar if he did not fear the right-wing — her theory being that it had not gone away, but was merely waiting in the wings.

Not so, he replied. All things that smack of radicalism had been shorn from the party, and likewise will be from its government.

The swerve towards the centre followed Aznar’s election as party leader on the endorsement of its founder Manuel Fraga Iribarne, five years ago. To lead what he calls Spain’s ‘Second Transition’, Aznar has sought to recruit a new young generation of party members who took up politics after the demise of Franco.

He has also added moderate centrist figures like Rafael Arias Salgado, Javier Ruperez, Marcelino Oreja and Rodolfo Martin Villa, all ministers in the former government of centrist Adolfo Suarez.

Ruperez is, in addition to being the PP’s parliamentary spokesman for foreign affairs, also general secretary of the Christian Democrat International. And at the other end of the spectrum, the trade union federation leaders were even invited to his last party congress — where the communist Antonio Gutierrez, general secretary of the Workers Commissions, received an ovation.

Aznar has promised to do everything possible to reach a German- style pact with trade unions and employers to encourage job creation and emphasised his party’s commitment to maintaining pensions, public health services and unemployment benefits.

But though growth is back to about three percent a year and inflation down to four percent, Spain has the highest unemployment rate in Europe and a welfare and pensions system that consumes an ever growing proportion of its budget.

Aznar refutes PSOE claims that a PP government will bring in massive cuts in welfare and public services. He argues that the country’s problems stem from high debt and plans to cut it with revenues from privatisation — essential if Spain is close on the criteria for joining a future European economic and monetary union.

Outsiders cast doubt on his promise to cut tax without service cuts to match, promising to recover the funds by targeting tax evaders. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development warned in its last survey of Spain that no government could make long-term cuts in public borrowing without major reforms of the country’s inefficient social security system.

This is dangerous ground for the PP, which narrowly lost the 1993 elections largely due to PSOE warnings that Spain’s seven million elderly, nearly a quarter of the electorate, would have their pensions slashed under a PP government. This time round the PP says pensions will remain indexed to inflation.

The PSOE has done all it can to break the PP’s new grip on the centre ground; party TV adverts show a montage of fascist-style rallies, snarling dogs and a industrial wasteland under the message: “The right does not believe in this country… it is not the solution, it is the problem”.

But the convincing PP wins in the 1994 European parliament elections and municipal and regional elections last year indicate that the voters do not believe him.

While the polls also give Sunday’s vote to Aznar and the PP, they also voice clear doubt that he can keep his election pledges.

But more so they showed also a desire for change after the years under Gonzalez.

Gonzalez rolled a heavy stone over the grave of Marx. Aznar says he has done the same to Franco. And with support fading for the defunct dictator’s dwindling band of political heirs, the shift to the centre — on his part and on the part of the electorate — may see him safely home Sunday.