Another would-be migrant claimed Moroccan police encouraged him, crying “come to Spain!”

It sounds like a tourist board slogan, and it turned out to be misleading. By Friday afternoon, these men, along with most of the illegal arrivals, were already trudging home, baffled by Ceuta’s lack of suitable accommodation, food or drink. Europe’s famed hospitality had let them down.

The stories of illegal migrants who made the journey there and back again contrast markedly with official Moroccan reports. Moroccan rights groups claim police used water cannons and fired warning shots to prevent crossings (clearly with little success). Morocco’s ambassador to Spain said events unfolded against Morocco’s wishes and that “we have always prioritized legal, orderly and safe migration for all” — a Freudian slip for the ages.

The days since have seen a rash of speculation over Morocco’s motivations for encouraging — or at least facilitating — the crisis. Commentators and experts point out Spanish ties to Western Sahara separatists and the reopening of lucrative economic ties with Morocco’s regional rivals Algeria, as well as Moroccan resentment over the perceived colonial nature of Spanish rule in Ceuta. Other analysts argue that a nexus of Moroccan, Israeli and American interests has combined in order to undermine the Spanish government led by socialist Pedro Sánchez, whom Donald Trump appears to see as the embodiment of Europe’s ills.

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Did Morocco facilitate the crisis? Were the young men’s claims of police encouragement true? This would help explain the scale of the migrant surge, but it cuts against Sánchez’s public response. Rather than rebuking Morocco for its egregious lapse in border enforcement, the Spanish leader thanked Rabat for its “cooperation” in defusing the situation.

Sánchez saved his ire, instead, for the 22 EU leaders who signed an open letter criticizing his pro-migration policies, in particular Spain’s recent mass regularization of illegal immigrants. Sánchez condemned the “selfish, polarizing and unlawful reaction” of his EU peers, saying countries that backed Spain’s temporary suspension from the Schengen Zone were “driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance, or political interest.”

In short, Sánchez appeared happier with Morocco — the state accused by many of facilitating the crisis — than with fellow Europeans seeking to enforce stronger migration controls.

Granted, Sánchez is typically a defender of migration. But his refusal to cast blame on Morocco illuminates a shift in relations between the EU and north Africa, driven by migration dynamics. This shift puts European leaders of all stripes in the same boat.

The EU has made the externalization of migration controls a crucial factor in relations with countries around its external borders. A cornerstone of the bloc’s rightward shift on migration — often labeled “Fortress Europe” — is a focus on bilateral agreements with third countries, particularly in north Africa, which act as gateway states for those seeking to attempt the perilous voyage across the Mediterranean.

These agreements tie EU financial aid to efforts from countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to contain illegal migration flows. European nations equip and train local maritime police while disbursing hefty financial aid to sweeten the deal. The EU’s controversial 2023 deal with Tunisia on migration proposed over €1 billion in aid, while Morocco, another key gateway state, has received hundreds of millions of euros, most of it earmarked for “integrated border management and the fight against smuggling and trafficking in human beings.”

EU leaders thought that by externalizing migration controls — and washing their hands of the dirty work involved — they had found the perfect solution. Stopping illegal migrants from ever reaching EU soil would, it was reasoned, save the bloc from ever having to confront the thorniest problem relating to illegal migration: the knot of human rights legislation that protects migrants once they arrive. For that reason, leaders hoped that partnership agreements would neutralize public concerns over illegal immigration.

But the Ceuta crisis suggests that “Fortress Europe” is a castle built on sand, one that is perennially vulnerable to the caprice of Europe’s partners. Incentivizing non-EU states to manage migration flows creates a mutual dependency: the gatekeeper states depend on EU financial aid, while the EU depends on their efforts to keep migrants off European soil. The seismic implication of Ceuta is that, amid growing Western panic over migration levels, that mutual dependency is no longer balanced — and the West’s partners are learning the art of blackmail.

Are Sànchez’s words, then, those of an out-of-touch, anti-European traitor, as many onlookers caricature him? Or are they, instead, the supplication of a man with a figurative gun to his head? It should, again, be emphasized that there is no hard evidence to prove that Moroccan authorities were complicit in the Ceuta crisis. But the EU’s externalized migration controls have handed its leaders significant power to disrupt Spain and the bloc as a whole, whether they choose to use it or not.

In that sense, the Ceuta incident shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The EU doesn’t have to look far for a precedent when it comes to hostile weaponization of illegal migration flows. For years, Poland has accused Belarus of sponsoring illegal migration, luring migrants from across the Middle East and Africa on tourist visas with the promise of an easy jaunt into the Schengen area. Successive Polish governments have undertaken heavy militarization of the country’s eastern border, and the route has become deadly. 

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk justified this uncompromising response by saying: “We are not dealing with just any asylum seekers, we are dealing with a coordinated, very efficient operation to break the Polish border and attempts to destabilize the country.”

The Polish response has been harshly condemned by human rights groups, which, given the severity of Warsaw’s measures, is unsurprising. Measures at the border with Belarus include a 5.5-meter-high steel fence with electronic monitoring systems to detect attempted crossings. Poland has also loosened rules around the use of firearms — introduced after a soldier was murdered at the border — that NGOs say give officers a “license to kill”. And since 2025, Poland has suspended the right of all arrivals from Belarus to claim asylum. The latter move was lambasted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as Poland’s commissioner for human rights, an internal ombudsman, as a violation of European law.

From the perspective of stopping illegal migration at the Belarusian border, though, Warsaw’s harsh measures have been a resounding success. While 40,000 attempted crossings were reported in 2021, and 15,500 in the first half of 2025, the official figure for the first half of 2026 was just 235. Belarus’s focus for illegal migration flows has now shifted to the Baltic states, forcing Latvia to seal its southeastern border at the end of July.

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Given openly hostile relations between Belarus and the EU, Minsk’s actions are understood as a form of hybrid warfare and punished as such through sanctions. The EU has no similarly clear-cut way of understanding the new power wielded by its partner states in north Africa. European leaders must, in this context, ask themselves two questions: how can they be sure that gatekeeper states are on their side, and, if there are concerns over these partners’ good intentions, what options does that leave?

One potential path is appeasement. Sánchez’s thanks for Morocco’s cooperation — in defusing a crisis which it stands accused of having created — can be understood in this light. The more money Europe pumps into external migration partnerships, the more dependent it becomes on those partner states, and the greater their strength — and Europe’s concurrent temptation towards appeasement — becomes.

A second option, in which Europe accepts that externalization agreements pose risks, would be to take back responsibility by significantly strengthening EU states’ own illegal migration controls and enforcement capabilities. This won’t happen, though, until leaders tackle the legal protections that migrants gain once they reach EU soil. There is a tight connection between changes in international human rights law and resultant migration: hence the apparent link between the Ceuta crisis and a Spanish Supreme Court ruling blocking deportations without due process for sea arrivals. It is the opposite effect to the plummeting rate of arrivals to Poland from Belarus since all asylum applications from that country were banned.

Thirdly, Europe could consider applying the playbook which it already uses against Belarus and Russia to any state which it suspects of weaponizing migration with hostile intent — even gatekeeper countries. Hostile exploitation of migration by Russia and Belarus is met with punishment in the form of sanctions and the severing of diplomatic relations. These tools, or at least the threat of them, could be applied more broadly. Facilitating mass illegal migration is not, after all, the act of a friendly nation.

The EU is the largest trading partner for all the key migrant gatekeeper nations in north Africa. It has the economic clout to deter potential hostile exploitation of migration by those states, and while not every lapse in migration controls is an act of hybrid warfare, a carrot-and-stick approach — the “stick” being the credible threat of sanctions — may restore balance to the increasingly lopsided nature of these relationships.

It is disturbing to think that exploitative illegal migration flows may be motivated by geopolitical power games. But Europe should be more disturbed by its powerlessness in the Ceuta affair; a powerlessness created by counterproductive elements of human rights legislation, formalized in externalization agreements with third countries, and exemplified by Sánchez’s thanks to a state which dramatically failed to uphold its end of the bargain in protecting Europe from illegal immigration. 

The EU must also face up to the fact that in the event of instability elsewhere in the region — renewed conflict in major migrant transit nation Libya, for example, or a breakdown in the EU’s fraught relationship with Tunisia — potentially hostile regimes may similarly wield migration as a weapon. This risk is only heightened by the ongoing surge of refugees north from war-torn African states; an estimated two million Sudanese refugees have fled to key EU partners Egypt and Libya alone since the nation’s civil war began in April 2023. 

One thing has become alarmingly clear: the ability of non-European states, who may not have our best interests at heart, to dictate migration flows, in so doing undermining societies and sowing panic. Europe gifted them this ability. Whatever conclusions it draws from the Ceuta crisis, it must now learn to stand up for itself.

Some analysts suspect that Morocco’s sudden lapse in enforcement may be in response to deepening ties between Spain and Algeria — the latter alleged to have sponsored Sahrawi separatists in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. In 2021, Morocco similarly waved through some 8,000 migrants to punish Madrid for hosting a Sahrawi leader. But a related — more insidious — reason for the latest breach is that Rabat is leveraging an increasingly close relationship with the Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.

MAGA has branded Spain Public Enemy No. 1 over its government’s strident posture towards the US and Israel during the Iran war. The socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has refused to allow Washington access to its Rota and Morón military bases, its consistent failure to meet Nato defense-spending targets also fueling MAGA ire. In March, the center-right American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin wrote a policy brief calling on the White House to formally recognize Ceuta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory. True to the spirit of Third-World decolonialism, Rubin wrote that Spain was “a colonial power running colonies across the Strait of Gibraltar”.

Within days, neoconservative congressman Mario Díaz-Balart had entoned Fidel Castro, stating that the enclaves were “not in the geographic territory of Spain” and should be “established, negotiated, and discussed between friends and allies”. Similarly, Reuters reported in April that a Pentagon email outlined options against Spain, including Nato suspension; the treaty states explicitly in Article 6 that territories in continental Africa are exempt from collective defense obligations.

For its part, Rabat has since transformed into a vital partner of Washington and Tel Aviv under the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, including Morocco, in 2020. Ironically, Rabat proceeded to leverage the development in the service of its own expansionist aims, with the first Trump administration recognizing Rabat’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.

The dispute over Western Sahara traces back to Spain’s 1975 withdrawal from what was then called Spanish Sahara. Under the Madrid Accords, Spain handed administration of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania; Mauritania withdrew from its share in 1979 after heavy losses to Sahrawi guerrillas. A 16-year war followed, pitting Moroccan forces against the so-called Polisario Front. Rabat eventually built an extensive sand wall — fortified with landmines and troops — partitioning the territory. In November 2020, Moroccan troops entered the UN-patrolled buffer zone to disperse Sahrawi protesters, prompting the Polisario to declare an end to the three-decade truce and a return to armed struggle. The two sides have since traded sporadic strikes along the sand wall.

Rabat has since made inroads on virtually every diplomatic front. Following normalization through the Abraham Accords, Morocco signed a security agreement with Israel in 2021, proving vital for the conflict in Western Sahara; in January, the two nations signed an additional joint military work plan. Then, in February, secret talks chaired by the US brought Moroccan, Algerian, Mauritanian, and Polisario delegations together for the first time since 2019.

In true Trumpian fashion, Morocco announced on Monday that it was naming the Dakhla-Tiznit highway, which runs through Western Sahara, after the US President. Ecstatic, Trump exclaimed on Truth Social: “Thank you to Highly Respected Mohammed VI, the King of Morocco — Such a Great Honor! I look forward to traveling the entire length of this Great Highway someday, hopefully soon!”.

All of this comes as a royal headache for Sánchez ahead of a general election in 2027. His record of raising wages and opposing US and Israeli war crimes has boosted his standing both at home and abroad. Yet a slew of corruption scandals, and a lax immigration policy, have seen his party, PSOE, as well as allies in Sumar and Podemos, consistently trail the Right-wingers of Vox and the People’s Party (PP) in polls.

In recent years, the bulk of low-skilled immigration to Spain has overwhelmingly come from Spanish-speaking Latin America. As a result, negative attitudes towards immigration are rather less pronounced in Spain than other European countries. At the same time, though, Spaniards overwhelmingly oppose illegal migration — especially from Arab and Subsaharan African countries.

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In January, Sánchez’s government issued a blanket amnesty for virtually all illegal immigrants living in Spain. The move, while laudable for granting labor rights to millions of workers, provoked an outcry, with roughly 60% of Spaniards expressing disapproval. Barring overwhelming enforcement on new arrivals, the issue with any such move is that it inevitably incentivizes further illegal immigration.

Sánchez now faces a quandary: clamp down in Ceuta and risk alienating affluent progressives in his coalition, or do little and suffer at the hands of the Spanish Right and the broader public. The former, naturally, is the sounder course. There is, moreover, room for the Prime Minister to maneuver geopolitically while outflanking the progressive Sumar and Podemos’ fantasies of an open-border utopia. After all, Sánchez can credibly accuse Morocco of acting at the behest of the US and Israel against a Nato member. At the same time, he could make a case in favor of overwhelming enforcement against illegal immigration precisely because of the March amnesty.

There is some reason to think that Spain’s famously sly Prime Minister could opt for just such a path, particularly as support for Sumar has collapsed from roughly 13% to 6%, and with Podemos in the doldrums too. The Socialist leader has defied the odds at consecutive elections, favoring high-stakes gambits against his Right-wing adversaries. Nonetheless, the PSOE and its allies have consistently failed to win more voters than the PP and Vox, instead relying on minor, regional parties to govern.

As both Denmark’s and Slovakia’s Social Democrats have shown, the key to Leftist success rests largely on a tough but humane immigration policy. In the wake of the surge in Ceuta, a member of PSOE’s youth wing made a surprisingly sensible plea. “The truth is, I hope this crisis pushes the PSOE to look at the immigration policies of its Northern European sister parties and realize it’s time to move away from what I see as an open-borders approach influenced by the more radical left,” they wrote. “That means protecting those who genuinely need asylum, maintaining secure borders, and avoiding mass regularizations.”

The Camino de Santiago is the name for over 200 recognized pilgrimage routes mostly on the Iberian Peninsula, which cover anywhere from 60 to 500 miles, though there are 12 primary paths. It is also having a cultural moment, amplified by social media and a stream of TikTok influencers. My motivation for going, however, resisted the internet entirely. I wanted to align myself with the things that really matter: to gain perspective on four chaotic years of college, to process the recent death of my dad, and to refocus before starting a full-time job in the fall. I read all the same popular websites and travel guides as the secular pilgrim, but I quickly noticed that my awareness of the spiritual dimension of the Camino’s routine was unusual. 

I began the Portuguese Way in Vigo, Spain — 15 miles north of the Portuguese border — and walked roughly 86 miles to Santiago de Compostela. I also incorporated a spiritual variant involving a boat ride up the Ulla River — because it was popular, sounded mystical, and I could find an abundance of information about it (online, of course). And I brought to the Camino the prayers and the orientation toward the divine that I had practiced back home. Each day, as my body assumed the posture of the pilgrim — struggling lungs, hinged hips, steady footfalls — this heritage came to my aid. I repeated the Jesus Prayer, a short Orthodox petition for mercy as I walked, and my footsteps joined its rhythm. My backpack bore a ceremonial shell with the sword-cross of Saint James the Apostle, a symbol of the pilgrimage since the Middle Ages, which lightened my burden, reminding me that my journey had been shared by millions throughout the ages. The repetition of the hours — wake, walk, drink an espresso, walk some more, and attend Mass in the evenings — became a kind of prayer of its own — and this habit of prayer was encouraged and reflected by the environment.

Not everyone, however, was on the same journey. The Camino has been circulating on social media in part thanks to the 2023 re-release of Emilio Estevez’s 2010 film The Way, and his concurrent announcement that he is planning a sequel. In the movie, Estevez’s father, Martin Sheen, plays a grieving American father traveling to retrieve the body of his estranged son, who was killed while walking the Camino. He is joined by a crew of unlikely companions — each walking for reasons that have nothing to do with God — and ends up completing the pilgrimage himself in a journey of self-discovery. 

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Most of the TikToks and Instagram reels in which influencers now document their “day in the life” on the Way are in the same vein: non-religious, or not explicitly Christian. “Film for the dad lore album,” reads an Instagram caption written by Gabe Escobar, a model and content creator known for his spontaneous travel vlogs, while he stands in front of the journey’s culmination: the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain. Escobar has said he’s not religious, though he is drawn to the beauty of the tradition. His daily videos detail the trials of solo hiking — trouble finding food, dehydration, foot pain, loneliness — accompanied by photos of beautiful vistas and happy smiles. 

The numbers reflect the widespread secular interest. In 2025, over 530,000 pilgrims received the Compostela, the certificate of completion given out in Santiago to pilgrims who have completed at least the last 62 miles on foot, a 6% increase from 2024. That figure is nearly ten times the figure from 25 years ago, with over a thousand pilgrims receiving the Compostela every day.

The majority of people I encountered along the Way were secular and wellness pilgrims. And it should be acknowledged that they were generous companions. In the city of Pontevedra, I shared cervezas and pimientos de Padrón with a woman named Catherine, who was willing to discuss matters of the spirit with a sincerity that would embarrass most dinner parties. She had recently quit her job and broken up with her long-term boyfriend, and felt like the Camino would help her make sense of the rupture in her life. She told me all of this within an hour of meeting. Though she was raised Catholic, she rejected the institution of the Church, and described herself as the classic “spiritual but not religious.” 

Another young guy I met at an albergue, who was traveling with his girlfriend, told me he was trying to do every route of the Camino, but that the churches themselves were “problematic” because the iconography of Saint James inside them was “Islamophobic.” He was referring to the representations of Santiago Matamoros — James the Moor-Slayer — which greet the pilgrim inside the cathedral, and in smaller churches all along the route. The apostle is depicted astride a white horse, sword raised above cowering Muslims, an image that originates in the legend of the Battle of Clavijo, in which James was said to have miraculously appeared to lead Catholic forces to victory during the Reconquista, a campaign to take back the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule. It is a stark image of violence and conquest, and a sore spot for the Church today, leading some cathedrals along the Camino to remove the statues entirely. 

Doubting the legend or the relics may be chalked up to ordinary skepticism, but rejecting the images inside the church is a different kind of act. To the pilgrim making it, it is a form of moral clarity, a rejection of violence and religious triumphalism, which fits neatly with contemporary commitments to social justice. I heard such claims used as a justification for continuing to walk a route that pilgrims associated with real violence. People are walking the Way in a spirit of resistance. 

The problem, however, is not that fellow pilgrims are not doing the Camino for the right reason — that is between them and God. It is rather that in conversation after conversation, I found a profound mistrust of the Church and the history that had established the route in the first place. The crisis, for me, came in realizing that the kind of personal growth most pilgrims wanted out of the walk was not merely indifferent to but at odds with the union with God that the Way was built to produce. One form of growth asks you to become more fully yourself through self-improvement, while the other asks you to be undone, to surrender as the pathway to transformation.

Self-improvement can be a positive goal, to be sure, and to seek change through transformative experience is not wrong. Saints throughout history have left their belongings and their communities, embarked on pilgrimages, and been transformed — by the desert, the pillar, the monastery, the mountain. There is a desire within most of us, in an age of information overload and the exhaustion it produces, for some shortcut to clarity, and the Camino presents itself as one. But treating this self-knowledge as the goal, rather than the byproduct, is a mistaken understanding of what its transformation is for. 

A challenge for the religious pilgrim, made difficult by the secular pilgrim’s logic, is not to confuse self-knowledge, however hard-won it may be, with knowledge of God and being in communion with Him. The pilgrimage, done well, prioritizes these two things properly. It strips away the routine of comfort that binds us to the material — through fatigue, blisters, hunger, loneliness, and thirst — so that what is left can be aligned with the vertical axis of the divine rather than the horizontal axis of the self. What I saw on the road, again and again, was pilgrims seeking the horizontal, when the route had been built to point upwards.

Unbelievers are helped in their skepticism by the status of the Camino as legend. The Apostle James was martyred in Jerusalem, beheaded, as recorded in the Book of Acts. The Camino commemorates a legend, not confirmed by the historical record, that his disciples carried his body by boat to Spain, near what is now Santiago de Compostela. This legend appeared only in the 9th century, when a hermit named Pelagius reported following a field of unusual stars to an abandoned Roman-era burial ground and found remains that the local bishop, Theodomir, declared to be James’s and those of his two disciples. In 1075, King Alfonso VI began building a church over the spot to house the relics, and pilgrims have been walking to it ever since. My path along the Ulla River is said to be the one they took. 

This background makes for a kind of plausible deniability employed by both Catholic and secular pilgrims. One can walk the entire route and arrive at the cathedral without having to affirm that the bones inside are real, providing a means of transformation without any demands of belief attached. And for the pilgrim already inclined to distrust institutional religion, the issues surrounding Santiago Matamoros offer a clean exit. 

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And yet the Way did not work only on the religious pilgrim — it was a kind of gift to all who embarked on it, even the unbelievers, and this might be the strongest evidence for what the Camino still is, underneath what it has become. One day, I walked with a woman who had done the Camino before. She told me she no longer believed James’s body is actually in the cathedral, and yet, upon arriving, found herself overwhelmed by it regardless. She lacked adequate explanation, though she tried. On another day, I met a woman who said she had been raised Catholic but was now agnostic. She told me that she had been reading the same poem — a Polish poem called “Pilgrim” — to herself each morning since the second day of the walk, unsure why she had started or why she continued. I also kept meeting a Polish family, first at the airport, again in the port city of Vigo, then at a roadside cafeteria, who told me that in Polish custom, meeting the same people three times means you must share a coffee. I felt something of the Camino’s own logic in that: by coincidence or by choice, in sharing a story, a coffee, or a bunk bed in an albergue, we found a kind of communion with each other, as if we were all simply meeting again, somewhere along the way, coming home.

The Camino raises a question that secular pilgrims don’t expect to be asked, one gesturing toward an encounter that can’t be conveyed through the internet.

I felt this acutely on my final day of walking. My body was running on too little communal albergue sleep, and the last of my reserves ran dry with roughly six uphill miles still to go. I ducked into a chapel in the historic town of Padrón, to rest my legs, pray, and rehydrate. While I was admiring the interior, trying to talk myself into the last stretch, I noticed a small angel holding a heart carved with my dad’s initials. That glimmer of the familiar, on a day I had nothing left, carried me the rest of the way.

It was a reminder that nothing on the Camino is the result of hard work alone. Every step is, in the end, a gift: the body carries you; generous patrons have built and maintained the road; between towns, strangers leave fruit and water. Ultimately, grace keeps you going on the day you would rather stop. The secular pilgrim is attuned to graciousness and hospitality, but as far as I could tell, the secular framework has no category for gift in the deeper sense — it can’t account for the poem the woman reads with no explanation, or the feeling of awe upon arriving at the bones whose authenticity one has doubted. It can account for effort, for achievement, for personal meaning made from an experience, but it has no place for the unearned or the miraculous. Gift is precisely what falls outside the framework of self-transformation, and it is what the Camino keeps insisting on, through nothing more dramatic than daily repetition of walking and fatigue, which regularly calls forth the mercy and friendship of strangers, even to those who did not come looking for it.

I am not Catholic. I attended the Pilgrims’ Mass at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela as a respectful guest and sat in shared reverence alongside people I had walked with — some for only a few hours, others for days. I did not cry or fall to my knees in awe upon reaching the cathedral. If anything, it felt more like a mixture of gratitude mixed with grief: gratitude for the thing itself, grief that so many arriving with me had been handed so little equipment for understanding what the thing was.

When self-transformation is the destination, the self remains at the center, perhaps to be enlarged, maybe even clarified, but it is still the organizing principle of the journey. The pilgrim returns home more herself, her pack lighter, her tolerance for discomfort improved. This is an accomplishment, right? But it is not what the tradition that built this road had in mind. The great pilgrims of the Church did not walk in order to become more fully themselves. They walked in order to become less themselves, specifically, to arrive at a place where the self, spent and humbled, might finally be available to something other than its own reflection.

The cathedral received us all, believers and unbelievers alike, and this, I suspect, is both the Camino’s great gift and its peculiar danger. It receives everyone. It transforms the terms of no one’s arrival. You have walked the Way, and you have reached the cathedral, and you are offered a next step. Whether to take it or not is up to you.

But if he’s a hero abroad, Sánchez is more often cast as a villain at home — an opportunist who has clung to power at the expense of Spain’s national interest. Sánchez has been the Secretary-General of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) since July 2014 and in office since June 2018. In that time, he’s survived Covid, the economic shock that followed, and the rise of the hard Right. Britain in the same period has churned through five prime ministers — including one who lasted just 49 days — and the economy has stagnated alongside its sewage-filled rivers.

What makes this period of stability even more surprising is that for the majority of Sánchez’s time as PM, he has governed in coalition. Since his re-election in 2023, he has presided over what sections of the Spanish press term a “Frankenstein government”. Whether it’s truly monstrous depends on your political affiliation — and perhaps your appetite for the gothic — but stitched together it certainly is.  To pass laws, PSOE has been forced into a coalition with a Left-wing alliance of smaller parties called Sumar, a verb which means “to add up”, though “make up the numbers” might be more apt. But even with their support, Sánchez falls short of a majority. So he must also go cap in hand for votes from separatist parties in the Basque Country and Catalonia that want independence from Madrid. It’s the alliance with these groups that’s proved particularly controversial. Unpopular concessions to the separatists have followed, including, most bitterly of all, an amnesty for the organizers of the illegal 2017 referendum on Catalan independence. Outside Catalonia and the Basque Country, support for independence is tiny and the subject provokes anger, even from liberals. Try saying “let them decide” in a Madrid bar and watch how the mood changes.

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So, many predicted this hodgepodge government couldn’t last. Yet it has, and Sánchez is winning admirers for the striking clarity of his values. So how on earth has he done it? 

For one thing, the Spanish system makes it hard to remove prime ministers. A government can only be toppled through a “constructive vote of no confidence”. That means opponents must agree on a replacement before they can bring the leader down.

Sánchez is also being helped by the fear of the hard Right, according to Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Carlos III University of Madrid. “Many parties back Sánchez not because they want his policies, but because they want to prevent the alternative,” says Simón. He’s referring to the emergence of the hard-Right party Vox, which has reshaped Spanish politics and coarsened the discourse, especially around immigration. In recent election campaigns, you occasionally hear the line Si te gusta el jamón, vota Vox — if you like ham, vote Vox — a charming refrain that left many wondering whether they really liked ham after all. The prospect of a coalition between Vox and the center-Right Partido Popular (PP) also helps explain Sánchez’s staying power.

But part of the answer lies in something that is almost alien to British politics, with its entrenched two-party structure, but which seems increasingly likely to define Britain’s next election: the politics of the bloc. Until recently, Spain looked very much like the UK — dominated for decades by just two political forces, PSOE on the Left and PP on the Right. That system cracked open after the 2008 financial crisis and fractured further with the rise of Vox. Sánchez has proved remarkably adept at navigating this new, uneven terrain. He cannily framed the 2023 election as a simple choice: vote for him, or get Vox. And for all the anger over his Faustian pact with the Catalan separatists, he has avoided giving them what they really want: a legal independence referendum.

The question for Britain is whether something similar may be happening at home. The recent Gorton and Denton by-election offered one of the clearest signs yet of the fragmentation of the two-party system. Together, Labour and the Greens took more than two-thirds of the vote, suggesting that in parts of the country a progressive bloc already outweighs the conservative one — music to the ears of those hoping a progressive alliance may finally be taking shape.  

A recent More in Common survey asked which parties voters would tactically block, and found that 38% of Britons would vote against Reform. Green voters were the most likely to say they would vote tactically against Reform, a view also shared by Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters. Britain’s electoral system may make formal coalitions less likely than in Spain, but informal dealmaking may already be beginning to take shape to prevent the alternative. Although progressive voters appear warm to the idea of cooperation between Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, the party machines are, for now, dead against it. Starmer’s sharp criticism of the Greens’ “sectarian” campaigning in Gorton and Denton hardly suggests he’s looking to them as a future bedfellow. And given the amount of energy he’s spent stamping out any whiff of association with the Corbyn-era Left, an alliance with the Greens of Zack Polanski would, surely, feel like the end of days.

Nevertheless, the comparison runs deeper than just voting patterns. Spain, like Britain, is a union state where the tensions pulling it apart feel familiar to anyone versed in Scottish or Welsh politics. A couple of years ago I invited my delightful Basque neighbors over for a drink. When I asked about their politics, they said they’d rather not say. It just “divides people”. As the penny dropped, I wondered briefly if this amiable couple were really cut out to be separatists. We changed the subject — Gibraltar, if I remember correctly — and got on with the rest of a pleasant evening. But in a very real way, it’s this ability to accommodate such differences that makes Sánchez’s coalition so striking: it forces the separatists to engage with the practicalities of governing, rather than just heckling from the sidelines.

“Sánchez has a remarkable political instinct,” says Simón. “His leadership style is extremely flexible and adapts quickly to changing circumstances.” Sánchez once ruled out an alliance with the separatists — until it became politically necessary. That flexibility can make him seem like a cynical operator, disguised as the handsome new doctor in a telenovela. But while the bloc holds, it also allows him to assert its values with apparent conviction. Sánchez excels at giving his base the signals it wants to hear. Time and again, he uses his power to claim the political banners that define his bloc: feminist legislation, defense of migrants, and forthright criticism of Israel’s military action in Gaza. 

And now his four-word rebuttal to Donald Trump. No a la guerra is not only a masterclass in clear communication, but a calculated callback to the Spanish Left’s opposition to the Iraq War. That conflict left a deep scar in Spain and brought down José María Aznar’s Right-wing PP government. Days before an election, ministers blamed the Basque separatists ETA for deadly train bombings, rather than the actual culprits, Al-Qaeda. 

Sánchez understands that in a multi-party system you can’t afford to be Diet Coke — you have to appear to be the real thing. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is so preoccupied trying to prevent the drift of Labour voters to Reform that he struggles to communicate his values at all. On Iran, he seemed to plant the exact flag that progressives, still wounded by Britain’s own bitter experience in Iraq, so desperately wanted to see. But then he hoiked it from the ground like a caddy at Mar-a-Lago, leaving everyone to wonder if a flag had been planted at all. Still, he says, “we will not be drawn into the wider war.”

To be fair, Sánchez is on safer ground with his anti-war stance. A recent poll showed more than two thirds of Spaniards are against the war in Iran. In the UK, opinion is foggier — a YouGov poll found 49% opposed and 28% in favor, with the rest unsure. But Sánchez made his call at the outset of the war, before any polling had been published. Why? Because he doesn’t need to hedge his bets. He knows exactly what his bloc wants to hear.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Sánchez is more adept at dealing with the reality of multi-party politics. Spain’s two-party system started to fracture long before Britain’s. During the protests that hit the country following the 2008 crash, pork products again entered the political arena as the public branded politicians chorizos, todos, or “a bunch of crooks”. From the anger emerged the new parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos, that shattered the old duopoly of PSOE and PP. 

The Right derided Podemos’s unconventional pony-tailed leader Pablo Iglesias as a “perroflauta” —  a brilliantly compressed insult for the Spanish breed of crusty found on town square benches with a dog (perro) and a recorder (flauta), and a repertoire consisting mainly of Manu Chao. But among Spanish progressives, excitement was through the roof. Many — including a friend of mine with three houses — joined the cause. A new energy swept through the Left, anticipating the early days of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK or Bernie Sanders in the US. Long-dismissed socialist ideas suddenly felt fresh, especially to a younger generation that had never heard them from the mouths of mainstream politicians. Within a few years of its creation, Podemos had won millions of votes and dozens of seats. 

Like Ciudadanos, Podemos has now faded. However, the blocs these parties helped create remain, and it’s between these sides that the political battle is now being fought. On the one side, you have Sánchez’s socialists and their regional allies; on the other, the conservative parties of PP and Vox. 

Of course, the comparison of Spain and the UK has its limits, not least the different electoral systems. And bloc politics is far from ideal. As Simón points out, it has some big drawbacks: increased polarization and making national agreements far harder to reach.

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But both Spain and Great Britain are dealing with fragmented politics and Sánchez is the master of the bloc. Far from being unstable, his coalition has proved more durable than Britain’s recent majority governments and forces him to take clear positions that resonate with his base. Across Europe, politics is now reorganizing around competing visions of migration, identity and the state. For a country where a night out rarely begins until midnight, Spain has arrived uncharacteristically early to the bloc party. British politicians may soon discover that survival depends less on commanding a majority than on mastering Sánchez’s delicate art of holding the bloc together. 

For Starmer in particular, if he can’t find a way to appeal to his own base, he risks looking less like Hugh Grant’s PM and more like a lonely teenager on a big stage clutching a sign that reads “Vote for Pedro”. 

No, I’m speaking not of President Trump’s plans for Greenland, but Andrew Jackson’s military campaigns in Florida that prompted the Spanish Empire to cede the territory to the United States in an 1819 treaty (Florida would become a state a quarter-century later). The historical parallels aren’t accidental. President Trump has long looked to Jackson — America’s seventh president, first national populist leader, and the co-founder of the Democratic Party — as an inspiration. 

The Greenland gambit is Trump’s most Jacksonian move. It’s also the clearest sign yet that Washington in the opening decades of the 21st century no longer views itself as the preeminent global hegemon, charged with upholding international rules and disciplining a handful of wayward “rogue states.” Instead, America increasingly sees itself as one power among others, locked in rivalry over land, natural resources, and material security.

That about describes the world in which Jackson, known as “Old Hickory,” operated. Trump and the wider Trumpian cohort have drawn what they see as the necessary conclusions and are pitilessly remaking US strategy to meet this new, old moment.

The shift shouldn’t come as a surprise. A year ago, I attended President Trump’s inauguration and one of the inaugural balls — and was struck by the Jacksonian vibes that gripped Washington. As I wrote in these pages, the second Trump inaugural offered “remarkable similarities” with Jacksonian democracy: the hard-charging nationalism, the anti-elite rhetoric (coupled with solicitude for pliant elites), the pledges of a coming golden age.

One step toward American renewal discussed in those early days was the takeover of Greenland. Such talk struck me as “preposterous” — the word I used to describe it in my UnHerd dispatch from the inauguration. I admit: I really didn’t think he meant it; surely, this was the opening bid in a negotiation that would conclude with Washington securing even better military-basing and mining rights than the existing agreement permits (and the current arrangements are extremely generous).

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But under the Jacksonian dispensation, no territory is truly secure without Old Glory planted on its soil. Which brings us to Jackson’s conquest of Florida in the years after the War of 1812. Jackson wasn’t president then. But he was famous as the Hero of New Orleans, the US Army general who’d repelled an invading force of some 8,000 redcoats before news of an Anglo-American peace treaty had reached the New World.

Afterward, Jackson emerged as an irrepressible advocate for the expansion and consolidation of US sovereignty across the North American continent. He found it downright offensive that the Old World powers should exercise any influence nearby. Doubly so when the Europeans conspired with the tribal “savages” — or when they failed, through weakness or neglect, to prevent the Indians from attacking the United States from European-controlled areas.

Spanish Florida presented the latter kind of problem. From it, the Seminole tribe mounted attacks on white settlements in the United States. And inside it, on the Apalachicola River in the northwest part of the territory, a group of escaped slaves had taken over an abandoned British fort heavily stockpiled with arms and artillery. The Negro Fort, as it became known, encouraged resistance to America’s “Peculiar Institution” and invited still more rebels and escapees.

The Monroe administration charged Jackson with suppressing threats along the southern border — but, crucially, without challenging Spanish territorial claims to Florida, unenforceable though they were. But Jackson couldn’t quite bring himself to accept the second half of his orders. And so he both suppressed the threats and took over Spanish forts in Pensacola and elsewhere, diplomatic niceties be damned.

He justified his actions as self-defense against Seminole raids and other threats emanating from Spanish Florida. “The Government of the United States,” he wrote at one point in the campaign, “is bound to protect her citizens, but weak would be her efforts and ineffectual the best advised measures if the Floridas are to be free to every enemy.” Earlier, US forces had already destroyed the Negro Fort, but Jackson’s subsequent campaign in 1818 extended this logic to the broader Florida frontier.

In other words: He believed that so long as the Spanish flag flew on the Florida territory, the American people couldn’t obtain the full measure of security to which they were entitled. And so the Spanish flag had to be removed. And so it was. Jackson’s overstepping of his military authority was initially embarrassing for the Monroe administration. Jackson’s critics there feared that unless Pensacola was restored to Spain, “war would result, the economy would crash, and the administration would be punished by the American electorate,” as the historian H. W. Brands sums up their view.

Outside critics pilloried Jackson’s apparent insubordination and his brutal ways in the campaign, not least his decision to execute two British officers (on the grounds that they had aided and encouraged the Seminoles against America). “We are fighting a great moral battle for the benefit not only of our country but of all mankind,” declared House Speaker (and Jackson arch-rival) Henry Clay. “Remember that Greece had her Alexander, Rome her Caesar, England her Cromwell, France her Bonaparte” — and America its would-be imperial despot, Jackson.

President Monroe returned the Spanish forts, but he refused to censure Jackson on the grounds that pathetic Spain had allowed Florida to become “the theatre of every lawless adventure,” and its rule over the territory was on its way to oblivion. He described it as a place “with little population of its own, the Spanish authority almost extinct [and] in a great measure derelict.” Jackson’s actions, then, merely ratified European weakness, and ultimately led to the full US takeover of Florida through the 1819 treaty negotiated by Secretary of State (and future President) John Quincy Adams. And the town of Jacksonville was so named in honor of Jackson’s military actions in the Sunshine State.

The resemblances to the current controversy are uncanny: the weak empire (Europe); the sparsely populated territory (the 30,000 or so Greenlanders); the Scotch-Irish disdain for European manners (Jackson’s and Trump’s); the threat of third parties endangering the United States through the contested land (China and Russia, in the current case). But above all: the rather expansive view of what it takes to secure the United States and a willingness to use light pretexts to extract lands from states incapable of defending them.

But there is one crucial difference: Most of Jackson’s actions, as a military chieftain and later as president, were either overwhelmingly popular or at least had a base of popular support. That can’t be said for Trump’s Greenland takeover, which is widely unpopular. Still, there is no denying that it is the Jacksonian foreign-policy legacy — both admirable and troubling — that Trump carries with him into the Arctic. “Every man combined with a gun in his hand,” Old Hickory himself wrote, “and all Europe combined cannot hurt us.”

Welcome to the Calle Gerona (to the English, just “The Strip”), which has become the destination of choice for British lads trips and stag dos. Earlier I walked past several men lumbering drunkenly along the street, dressed in black t-shirts reading “DAVE THE C**T’S 40TH” with photos of Dave in varying states of inebriation and undress below. At 20-meter intervals, dealers flog “da gear”, or else are propositioned by pale, topless lads, fresh off the plane at Alicante, conspicuously exchanging wads of cash.

In their 1976 book, The Golden Hordes, John Ash and Louis Turner theorized that “motivated by the desire to escape from his home society, the tourist soon imposes its values on the society he is visiting”. But The Strip is less an imposition than a simulacrum of Britain, where the bars have vacuously patriotic names like The Rose and Crown, The Red Lion, and The Queen’s Arms, and are decorated with booze-drenched, faux-leather stools, snooker tables, and monolithic screens showing Sky Sports, RacingTV, and GB News. Even British sectarianism has come here, albeit as a racist, drunken charade: on 13 July some 500 people attended an Orange Day parade, where racial slurs were hurled at the mostly Indian and Pakistani shopkeepers.

This is the Benidorm of popular derision; a resort sneered at for its stereotyped horde of boozed and sunburnt Brits, who — the idiots! — voted Brexit, despite literally visiting Spain once a year, where their only nod to the local culture is a reluctant pint of Estrella and a cursory glance at the fried calamari, before choosing fish and chips instead. “Benidorm is like England, little England,” says Jez, a goateed 55-year-old with a West Country accent, who works on The Strip. “People say they’re going to Spain. They’re not. They’re going to Benidorm.” Still, Jez loves it: he earns €1,500 a month plus tips, and lives in a five-bedroom villa with a swimming pool. He’s been in Benidorm for 34 years and prefers it to the actual England, “that shitty place”, where the weather’s bad and the costs of booze and living are extortionate.

In Julian Barnes’s 1998 novel, England, England, a businessman creates a theme park on the Isle of Wight that replicates England for tourists. It is “everything you imagined England to be, but more convenient, cleaner, friendlier, and more efficient”. That twee replica hosts the best of England (the Houses of Parliament, Stonehenge, Old Trafford, and even the Royal Family) without any of the contradictions, nuance, and grievances that make England, well, England. Benidorm is the inverse of that, catered to the British tourist; instead of denying the national id, it flatters it with affordability, permissiveness, and familiarity. It asks of British tourists only their presence and their money, and in return offers a fantasy version of Britain that will take their desires seriously.

That’s why it attracts the pathological disgust of haughty, metropolitan Britons. “They’re from a different species,” says out-of-touch cabinet minister Hugh Abbot in the BBC’s The Thick of It when confronted with actual people; that is the gaze most often cast on Benidorm. “Busy beaches and British food,” the photographer Rob Ball tells me, “are not everyone’s idea of an ideal holiday. But for some, including many working families, it’s exactly what they want to do with their limited holiday allowance each year.”

There is no sneering of tourists within Benidorm, only warmth and welcoming. “I went to Benidorm with an open mind and found a place full of warmth,” says Ball. “It was infectious to be surrounded by people enjoying themselves.” As the seatbelt sign switched off on his flight from Leeds-Bradford to Alicante, passengers perambulated the aisle, exchanging hotels, anecdotes, recommendations, and phone numbers. Ball, who spent a year photographing the city, captures this joviality in his latest photography book, Benidorm. One image shows the Western Salon filled with England fans watching the Euros on TV, the walls draped with neon-lit St George’s flags. Hands on their heads, or around each other’s shoulders, a community hastily forms among this transient crowd, cheering on the national team. “Nothing annoys some tourists more than the presence of other tourists,” write Ash and Turner, but in Benidorm the opposite is true.

So far, Spain’s widespread anti-tourism protests have been absent here. It’s not these Brits, happily sequestered on the Costa Blanca, who are being ambushed by Spaniards with water pistols and told to “Go Home!” Instead, it’s the church-ponderers, with their penchants for authentic city center apartments, that have caused a dearth of rental accommodation in cities like Barcelona. “Your AirBnB used to be my home,” shouted last summer’s protesters. But in Benidorm, there would be no homes without the hotels. “In this town,” says Tracy, who runs the travel website Benidorm Seriously, “almost everyone depends on tourism.”

The only thing that ever happened in Benidorm before tourism was fishing. Its fishermen were masters of the almadraba, an ancient Phoenician tuna-fishing technique, by which a complex maze of nets trap bluefin tuna as they swim from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean — a practice that was obsolete by the 20th century. By 1950, there were only a handful of hotels, catered to Spanish tourists, and no running water. But that year, a new mayor was elected: the enterprising Pedro Zaragoza.

That same year, Vladimir Raitz, co-founder of Horizon Holiday Group, took the first airborne package holidaymakers to Corsica for a week of sunbathing. Soon, everyone in Britain would want what Ash and Turner call “the four S’s” (sun, sand, sea, and sex) as an annual reward for their toil. Foreseeing this, Zaragoza wanted to capitalize on the leisure revolution, but there was a problem: ever since its invention in 1946, the bikini had been considered a moral danger by the Catholic Church, and was prohibited by local authorities in many parts of Francoist Spain, including Benidorm’s Alicante Province. No bikinis meant no foreign tourists, and so Zaragoza swapped the morality of Spain for that of Northern Europe, signing a municipal order in 1951 that allowed them to be worn on the beach.

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Threatened with excommunication by the Archbishop of Valencia, Zaragoza arranged an audience with General Franco: he woke up at 4am, stuffed newspaper down his shirt to keep warm, and drove his little green vespa for eight hours until he reached Franco’s palace in Madrid, where he earned El Caudillo’s support. (He would later become Franco’s Director-General of Tourism.) A large cross was placed on the Sierra Helada, overlooking Levante Beach, by local friars atoning for the town’s sins. Father Aparicio Pellin didn’t think this went far enough: “Oh! If they erected a black cross on the beach for every mortal sin committed there, the beach would have more crosses than grains of sand.”

“Without the bikini,” Giles Tremlett writes in Ghosts of Spain, “there, quite possibly, would be no modern Benidorm.” Nor would there be a recognizable modern Spain — a colossus of tourism, where the industry accounts for 15% of GDP. There are now some 43,600 hotel beds in Benidorm and more high-rises per capita than any town in the world — thus its nickname, BeniYork.

In the late Fifties, the British arrived in Benidorm. (In 1956, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath honeymooned there, a trip which his poem, “You Hated Spain”, uses to illustrate their incompatibility: “Spain frightened you. / Spain. Where I felt at home.”) But it was only after Alicante airport opened in 1967 that tourists from Northern Europe came en masse: by 1977, it hosted 12 million visitors, more than it ever has since.

As Benidorm boomed, the inexorable decline of the British seaside began. But the spirit of towns like Clacton and Skegness, Eastbourne and Southend, lives on here — most notably in the presence of variety shows and tribute acts. “Cabaret died in the UK 30 years ago,” says Derek, a cabaret singer from Northern Ireland. “But it’s still going in Benidorm.” He wears aviators, a short-sleeve green shirt, and a fedora. He moved here 15 years ago because there was little work in Belfast, and was soon performing 22 shows a week, such as “The Blues Brothers Experience” and a Joe Dolan tribute.

“People come, firstly, for the sun; secondly, the cheap booze; and thirdly for the entertainment,” says Tracy, who says that her online “What’s On” guide had around two million hits last year. She tells me how, as well as cabaret, bingo is crucial to Benidorm’s entertainment scene. The problem is that the Brits dislike the licensed bingo halls. “The main reason the British don’t go to them is that the numbers are called in Spanish, and very fast,” she says. Illegal bingo is often advertised as “housey-housey” (its archaic, British name) and people have been arrested for playing it. She knows of one bar whose bouncers used to have a panic button which they would press if the police were coming. A light then flashed, and everyone would hide their bingo tickets.

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A few blocks away from The Strip, Gary Lee James does an Elvis tribute at Sinatra’s Bar. “Is this your first time as an audience?” he asks the quiescent crowd in wobbly American. But once he sings “Sweet Caroline”, the audience is his: they wave their hands, clap, and shout “duh-duh-duh” with customary obeisance. James moves like the late Elvis, overcoming all his barbiturated physicality to get through another night in Vegas. He crunches a bottle of water between the songs. “This isn’t my real accent,” he says. “This is. I’m from Coventry.”

“He’s the best Elvis impersonator in Benidorm,” says Jamie*, an elderly Scouser. “Costs a hundred quid to see him at the [Benidorm] Palace. You’re lucky.” But that’s not why Jamie and his wife turned up tonight. “We’re here for Benidorm Tom,” he says, a Tom Jones tribute playing later. Every year Jamie and his wife spend July and August here. Why? “Because we love the entertainment.”

“I’ve always said that Benidorm should have been Europe’s Las Vegas,” says Derek wistfully, but that was never to be. Less than a city of angels, Benidorm is a tribute town; not just to Elvis and Tom Jones, but to the country its British patrons left at home. Here there’s no B-sides, no disappointments, no taking-yourself-too-seriously; there’s only the hits, the crowd-pleasers, and the warmth of the sun.

Earlier that day, a power outage originating in Spain had swept across the Iberian Peninsula and part of France. Traffic lights went down and trains stopped in their tracks, above and below ground. Given that the blackout lasted less than 12 hours, our response in hindsight appears slightly hysterical. But until that update at the supermarket, which we couldn’t verify in any case, we had no way of knowing it would be over so quickly. We had no mobile reception or Internet access of any kind, and so we couldn’t communicate with anyone outside the village.

Much as one would expect in an apocalyptic film, the information flowed just long enough to provide inklings of disaster. On WhatsApp, a fake news story claimed that Russia had launched a massive cyberattack across Europe. Speaking to neighbors, we heard that the cause was in fact some kind of atmospheric phenomenon, affecting not just southern Europe but also, bizarrely, Japan. Apparently, Portugal was going to be without power for days. Then, after an hour or two, our communication channels dried up. Before long, there was no water in the taps.

Anxiety spread quickly. Outside our village, the quiet country road was backed-up with drivers rushing to fill their tanks. Some of the local grocery stores were stripped bare by panic-buyers. We kept our nerve for most of the afternoon, reassuring one another with uneasy jokes and casual speculation. After a while, though, we began asking questions. What if the stores didn’t open in the morning? What if there wasn’t any water left on the shelves? Doesn’t so-and-so down the road have a cistern, a solar panel, a Starlink connection? And so we persuaded ourselves that, actually, we had better err on the side of caution. That’s how we ended up at the supermarket, where two girls stationed at a closed door asked if we had cash, before ushering us inside. That is the nature of radical uncertainty, as typically seen in a bank run: you know you are probably overreacting, but why take the risk?

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Above all, the blackout was a lesson in how utterly dependent modern society is on a product that we never see directly, and rarely think about: the constant, reliable flow of electrons through copper and aluminum wires. The incident has raised serious questions about the future of Europe’s electricity systems. To meet their environmental goals, European countries are trying to electrify large parts of their economies, including cars, household heating and industrial processes. Data centers to provide computing power will mean further, big increases in electricity demand. At the same time, Europe is rapidly switching to renewable energy sources, notably wind and solar, to provide that electricity, and in many cases is shutting down the coal, gas and nuclear-powered alternatives. According to one estimate cited by the Financial Times, government targets mean that electricity will be responsible for 70% of the continent’s energy by 2050, up from around 20% today. More than 90% of that electricity could come from renewables.

This growing dependence on electricity comes with significant risks, including sabotage. Those who suspected hostile actors to be responsible for Monday’s blackout were not merely paranoid. Since the escalation of the war in Ukraine, numerous power cables running under the Baltic Sea have been targeted, prompting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to disconnect from the Russian grid. Centralized electricity networks are appealing targets for terrorists and adversaries, since bringing them down can paralyze a society, and sow chaos in the process. Thanks to the digitalization of grids, cyberattacks are increasingly plausible, and are in fact being reported with growing frequency.

The shift to green electricity also brings dangers that governments have been slow to mitigate. Battery technology for storing wind and solar power remains ineffective. This means that electricity becomes scarce — and expensive — when there is no wind or sun, but it also means that renewables can, at times, produce too much energy relative to demand, endangering the stability of the grid. By contrast, the output of gas and nuclear plants can be closely controlled to maintain a balanced supply, and their turbines are better at smoothing over disruptions. Last week, at a London conference attended by 60 countries, the International Energy Agency raised these issues as threats to energy security. In a confidential report seen by Bloomberg, the IEA warned against the “premature retirement” of less volatile energy sources that are needed to stabilize grids.

It appears likely that such vulnerabilities triggered the blackout in Spain. The country is a leading adopter of renewable energy, with 72% of its electricity coming from wind and solar in the moments before the outage struck. According to Red Eléctrica de España, the national grid operator, the crisis began when a solar plant in the southwest of the country disconnected suddenly. The cause was probably an oversupply of electricity, combined with a shortage of traditional plants that could have lowered their output in response. And this was foreseen: Red Eléctrica warned in February that, due to a “high penetration of renewable generation”, “severe” outages could be on the horizon.

Though it lasted less than a day, Monday’s power cut will cast a long shadow over the politics of Net Zero. Last year, the Spanish government confirmed its decision to retire the country’s five nuclear power plants, a move criticized by opposition parties on the Right. Unsurprisingly, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez this week vehemently denied that over-reliance on green energy was culpable for the blackout.

An almost identical exchange played out in Britain, with Keir Starmer adopting the same line as Sánchez, while Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch claimed that renewables were likely responsible. The blackout will certainly frighten Starmer’s Labour government, which is pushing for 95% of electricity to come from renewable sources by 2030. After all, the British grid came dangerously close to failure in January, when weak wind and solar generation struggled to meet high winter demand for electricity. The day after the Iberian power cut, former prime minister Tony Blair broke with his party by publicly stating that an ill-conceived rush for Net Zero was inviting a backlash that could “derail the whole agenda” of decarbonization.

Meanwhile, electricity is also creating tensions between European countries. A system dominated by renewables will require a shared electricity market underpinned by an extensive network of transmission cables, allowing electrons to flow from areas with wind and sun to those without. That arrangement is still taking shape, but it’s already apparent that consumers don’t like paying more for electricity because demand is spiking elsewhere. In December, for instance, when Germany and Denmark suffered a period of dark doldrums — cold, cloudy, windless weather — their neighbors baulked at meeting the shortfall in generation. Norway’s governing parties pledged to sever its electricity connections with Denmark, while Sweden demanded that Germany restructure its electricity market to prevent competition from high-demand industrial regions — a request that was backed up this week by the organization overseeing Europe’s grids. The Swedish economy minister also took the opportunity to criticize Germany for voluntarily shuttering its nuclear energy capacity. In France, meanwhile, the opposition National Rally has pledged to exit from the EU’s system of cross-border electricity trading.

The problems posed by renewables are not insurmountable, but they require a measured and honest approach, not a blind dash for quotable statistics. I write this as a supporter of green energy in principle. We should begin with a recognition that, as the energy analyst Javier Blas writes, “grid design, policy and risk mapping aren’t yet up to the task of handling too much power from renewable sources”. Rather than closing down gas and nuclear plants, governments will, for the time being, need more of them to provide resilience and backup sources of electricity. They will need to limit the share of solar and wind generation to prevent grids from becoming fragile. And they will have to upgrade infrastructure to incorporate renewables properly, while improving storage and flexibility.

This will only work if the associated costs and risks are negotiated with the public. Ofgem, Britain’s energy regulator, announced on Wednesday that it would “need hundreds of billions of dollars in investment to build the capabilities needed to run a clean power system and decarbonize the economy”. These upgrades will add further costs to consumers. Seeing your electricity bill go through the roof — even as your local environment is overwhelmed by pylons and solar panels — is bad enough; it is considerably worse when your government refuses to acknowledge there are any downsides to the green transition.

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The political consensus around Europe’s sustainability agenda has been fraying for some time, but more major blackouts will prove fatal. Decarbonization has become so politicized that even if renewables are not actually responsible for the failures in question, they will be discredited by association.

An even more pressing question, though, is how to safeguard against our growing dependence on electricity more generally. The Portuguese town I visited during the blackout showed an impressive degree of resilience, because it could fall back on older technologies. Within hours, uniformed wardens were directing traffic at the gas station, where drivers did manage to refuel their cars. Here and in other local businesses, a key factor was that people still used and accepted cash. Now imagine a scenario in which the majority of vehicles, virtually all payments, and even central heating systems are dependent on electricity. Imagine that government and basic services have become heavily reliant on artificial intelligence software. Adaptation would be more difficult, and the sense of panic considerably greater.

In an ideal world, we would try to ensure that manual and mechanical systems don’t disappear from society entirely, providing a backup to digital and electrical technologies. But this seems overly optimistic. All the more reason, then, for governments to prioritize the robustness and security of our electricity networks, ensuring, among other things, that they stay ahead of the competition in the fast-evolving realm of cybersecurity. As for businesses and communities, a diesel generator or solar module for use in emergencies would not go amiss.

As I quickly realized during the outage in Portugal, what makes such situations different today compared with the recent past is the degree to which we have become conditioned to a constant flow of information. We are now so accustomed to engaging with the news on an hour-by-hour basis, if not a minute-by-minute one, that losing this link to the outside world can be profoundly disorienting and even panic-inducing. When a sudden, unexplained event ruptures the fabric of normality, it soon becomes apparent that the whole edifice of society rests on a fragile foundation of trust. Were a world of media junkies to be plunged into silence, that trust might not last very long.

It’s a fair point. For if tourism powers the bloc’s otherwise torpid economy, more galleries and restaurants is not what Europe needs. Squeezed by a conservative business culture, and an elephantine welfare state, genuine entrepreneurs increasingly seek exile in the Anglosphere, while the workers that remain wallow in low-paying service jobs. Especially as the shock of Trumpism forces the continent to defend its fading interests, it’s a recipe for economic catastrophe, with the EU expected to encompass just one tenth of global GDP by 2100.

Yet if the Old World needs to reclaim the magic of the Medici, the continent’s redemption will come far from Florence. Rather, Europe’s periphery is leading the way, with places like Portugal and Greece offering sunny business prospects dashed with pleasant weather. Combined with similar dynamism in the former communist states of eastern Europe, it’s increasingly possible to talk of a European Sun Belt. For just like the former Confederacy, once disdained and now booming, the continent’s future will be made on its edges — if, that is, the EU’s reactionary status quo can finally be vanquished.

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Europe’s economy is broken. Over the past 15 years, the Eurozone has grown about 6% in dollar terms. The US has jumped 82%. The biggest gap is in tech: of the top 50 tech firms, only three are located in Europe, with the list unsurprisingly dominated by Silicon Valley. Not that Europe’s entrepreneurial deficit is not only in ones and zeros. MIT researcher Andrew McAfee has shown how, over the last 50 years, the US has created “from scratch” companies with market cap of over $10 billion five times faster than the EU. No wonder some observers now quip that Europe is “a museum as a continent and a museum as a stock market”.

Faced with this malaise, and geopolitical upheavals from Kyiv to the White House, it’s little wonder that Europe’s leaders, in Paris and Berlin, are rushing to reindustrialize. That’s clear enough militarily, with the Bundestag promising €500 billion for new tanks and missiles. Yet if the German defense minister claims his countrymen have an “erotic relationship” with weapons — and we agree that bolstered self-sufficiency is necessary given Trump’s rising isolationism — it’s unlikely that Europe can thrive in the 21st century through force-of-arms alone.

Certainly, you shouldn’t count on Brussels, prime mover of the continent’s decline, to reverse the slide to irrelevance. Mario Draghi’s much-ballyhooed response to the current crisis followed the old patterns of green obsessions, social “inclusion” and ever greater conformity with Brussels edicts. Europe’s grandees believe that money fleeing Trumpian chaos will head to a permanent economic shift towards the Old World. But that ignores the fact that Europe is far more dependent on exports than the US, and lacks new industries that can compete with either America or the rising powers of the developing world.

Instead, the best hopes for European revival lie not in the old heartlands of the Ruhr or Picardy, but in enterprising economies of the south and east. “France and Germany are not good for startups, while places like Spain and Portugal are catching up and far more open to new firms,” suggests Giacomo Gentili, founder of the Pack digital mentoring firm, itself based in Barcelona. Other tech experts agree. For Andrea Zorzetto, co-founder of People Rank, a Milanese social media outfit, the European periphery offers ample opportunities for ambitious startups.

To a large extent, these transformations can be understood in fiscal terms. As traumatic as the great financial crisis doubtless was for countries like Greece and Spain, EU strictures did oblige them to finally reform their internal markets. “They were forced to change and reform while others did not,” says Veronica de Romanis, an economist who advises the Italian ministry of finance. “After 15 years they are the ones that [are] growing.”

An example to the contrary is de Romanis’s native Italy, which retains high costs and eye-watering tax rates. School teachers in Naples or Milan can expect to pay upwards of 60% of their income to the state, while sales taxes squeeze them even more. Despite its handsome piazzas and educated population, no wonder Italy today boasts far less venture capital funding per head than either Portugal and Spain. Eastern Europe, too, continues to bask in its post-Soviet sun. Big new IT investments are taking place in Polish towns like Wroclaw, where Intel is building a $6.4 billion semiconductor facility. Google, for its part, plans to invest up to $2 billion in a Romanian data center.

As these examples imply, much of this investment is happening in tech. Three of the EU countries with the highest proportion of IT workers are all found on the continent’s edge: Ireland, Malta and Lithuania. People with advanced degrees in places like Poland are far less likely to be unemployed than their counterparts in the UK and France. According to Nima Sanandaji, a Swedish economist, traditional tax-and-spend havens just can’t compete, especially when their obsession with EU climate policies tend to mean energy costs are much higher.

Taken together, it’s little wonder that peripheral Europe is now growing faster than its more established rival, with a so-called “regional inversion” set to upend cliches of Nordic verve. It helps, of course, that much of southern Europe is blessed with the so-called “Mediterranean premium”. From the weather to the food, much of southern Europe is a delight, another neat echo of California in its 20th century pomp. Though not quite as stunning as my adopted home state, states like Georgia and Florida are similarly attractive. The summers might be sticky, but lower energy prices also allow for the generous use of air conditioning.

It’s unsurprising, too, that the European Sun Belt has become popular with digital nomads, while Barcelona and Lisbon now host digital hubs for Danone and Carlsberg respectively. “The quality of life here attracts people,” says Gentili, whose staff includes Spaniards, Italians, Japanese and Argentinians. The wages help too: a software designer in Portugal is a third cheaper than in France, while similarly skilled workers in eastern Europe are as much as half the price. All told, offshoring to low-cost tech hubs in Europe can lower project expenses by up to 70%.

Yet if these strengths have seen even Greece’s tech sector grow by 15% in a single year, this model is not without challenges. In cities like Lisbon, an influx of digital nomads has driven up prices for local residents. The southward flow also threatens the very authenticity that attracts people to these spots to begin with. Troops of US graduates may make good techies, but they risk undermining the Old World charm of southern Europe in much the same way as mass development in California has sapped away its laid-back character.

There are broader questions, too, about the viability of Europe’s periphery, something that goes well beyond tech and other bluechip firms. At the grassroots level, the number of European self-starters has actually dropped in recent years, even as their counterparts in America are thriving. “In Europe people are afraid to fail and take risks like in the US,” Zorzetto argues. “Europe has become a continent of old money. We have to get back to our entrepreneurial, artisanal DNA.”

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Considering the continued legacy of welfarism from Porto to Piacenza, it’s a reasonable point, even if the communist legacy doubtless bestows the continent’s east with more collective grit. “We are hungrier, and western Europe has a high level of comfort,” says Gabor Szanto, a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter. “We had nothing, so we worked harder and risked more.” To explain what he means, Szanto describes the remarkable rise of the region’s film industry, with Hungarian studios alone now employing some 20,000 workers.

For both established Europe and the upstarts, events in America are, at least, shaking things up. “I think we should see Trumpism as a historical opportunity for Europe,” says Ermelinda Campani, director of the Breyer Center for Overseas Studies, a Stanford-affiliated institution in Florence. But Campani sees a future where Europe capitalizes not on its huge welfare state, but on its technological nous as well as its artisanal skills in design, fashion and food.

To be sure, such a transformation wouldn’t be unprecedented. Throughout its history, Europe has seen economic power shift from Italy in the Renaissance, to the Dutch Republic in the 17th century, to industrial Britain, Germany and France in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, again, is time for something new, with Kraków and Alicante happy to oblige.

Of course, Europe’s powerful progressives will resist any such shift. The Guardian predictably calls for Europeans to preserve the continent’s welfare and climate regime. Certainly, this approach is central to the European Commission, which remains wedded to net zero and continent-wide green initiatives. Essentially, then, they are reaffirming the formula that has brought Europe to the brink of economic irrelevance. Yet doubling down on this approach, combined with low fertility rates, will inevitably ensure that spots like Florence remain what they are now — lovely museums, but museums nonetheless.

The short answer is abusing his royal position to fraudulently accrue a personal fortune and receive sexual favors. If rumors that he is writing his memoirs to tell his side of the story, and set the record straight of his contested legacy are true, the principal obstacle will be that he remains clueless about what he has done wrong. In reality, Juan Carlos’s conduct has not changed much over the last half a century, but what Spanish citizens expect of their leaders is now completely different. The Emeritus King isn’t accustomed to giving explanations, the Spanish media having historically treated him with kid gloves and the general population indulging rumors around his infidelities as part of his Don Juan charm.

But you’d be wrong to think it’s all sexual deviance and financial corruption. Juan Carlos is the chief architect of modern Spanish democracy, whose leadership was central to the country leaving behind its dictatorial past and becoming an active member of the European Union. While detractors claim that he had a blithe disregard for the rules and regulation of democratic law, apologists point to the fact that Spanish democracy might not even exist were it not for Juan Carlos. It remains to be seen which of the two opposing interpretations will overshadow the other in history books of the future.

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On the day Juan Carlos was born, in Rome in 1938, the exiled Spanish royal family were optimistic about returning home. The Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936 with a military coup against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic (1931-1936), was turning in favor of the Right. General Francisco Franco proved remarkably successful at convincing a broad church of conservative factions that their interests would be best protected under his command. He always gave the impression that his success would secure the return of the royal family who left Spain with the proclamation of the Second Republic.

Following his victory, however, Franco had no desire to share power. Don Juan de Borbón, Juan Carlos’s father and heir to the Spanish throne, was extremely bitter about being hoodwinked by the upstart dictator. Presenting himself as a democratic alternative, he became increasingly vocal about his criticisms of the regime following Allied victory in the Second World War. The Spanish royal family had not bothered much about democracy during the Civil War, but Don Juan played on the fact that, with Hitler and Mussolini gone, Franco was a fascist relic.

As for El Caudillo himself, he was preoccupied by the question of succession. He was not averse to a hypothetical return to the royal lineage after his own death: as long as the core values of the regime remained intact. Don Juan’s vocal criticisms of the regime therefore ruled him out as a potential successor. Used — to borrow a phrase from Spanish historian Paul Preston — as a “shuttlecock” in power games between Don Juan and Franco, Juan Carlos was removed from his family as a child and sent to Spain where he was groomed as a prospective head of state. Educated in military academies, he realized the armed forces would never forgive his father for speaking ill of Spain abroad. Juan Carlos was not particularly academic or intellectual, but he developed arguably more important skills: quick-thinking, bonhomie and a chameleon-like ability to adapt to different scenarios.

Juan Carlos’s profile both in Spain and abroad were raised when he married Princess Sofia of Greece in 1962. Their honeymoon gave them the opportunity to meet foreign diplomats, and to present themselves as representing the best candidates to steer Spain towards a peaceful transition to democracy. Franco kept his own counsel, maintaining Juan Carlos close without making his succession plans explicit. Ironically, given his love of hunting and bullfighting, Juan Carlos’s first state appointment was as the president of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund in 1968. During the dictatorship, Spain never recognized Israel and maintained close socio-political ties with Arab countries. In his capacity as the Iraqi ambassador, Saddam Hussein received the Grand Cross of Isabel the Catholic Queen in recognition of his services to Spain from an ailing Franco, and a young Juan Carlos, in 1974. Juan Carlos was at least as interested in the economic and strategic importance of states as potential allies to Spain as he was in their democratic credentials, or lack thereof.

Keen not to burn any bridges, and aware of the need for dialogue if Spain wasn’t to be plunged into chaos, Juan Carlos was assiduous in meeting with Spanish politicians and opinion-makers from across the ideological spectrum in the years leading up to Franco’s death. On becoming head of state, he never tired of saying that he sought to be “King of all Spaniards” in televised and parliamentary addresses. This formulation, crucial in avoiding a return to the bitter bloodshed of the Civil War, conveniently ignored the fact that, for all his royal credentials, his institutional legitimacy derived from being a dictator’s chosen heir (and, to this day, Juan Carlos and Sofia will not allow anyone to badmouth Franco in their presence). Sofia, who speaks fondly of Franco in interviews, credits his daughter with not sabotaging the succession.

On the one hand, more influence was concentrated in the King’s hands than in any of his royal counterparts in Europe. To all intents and purposes, the remit of his role had been designed by a dictator. Conversely, he was the monarch with a most precarious position. The Spanish royal family were not as integrated into society as, say, the House of Windsor in the US. Juan Carlos walked a tightrope to mediate between Francoists with scant democratic or international credibility, who nevertheless held institutional power, and an opposition whose principal negotiating card was to imbue the transition with legitimacy. The King’s political survival being tied to non-radical democratization ensured his role is better assessed in tactical, not ethical terms. Nothing short of an expert tactician would have delivered, given the constant threat of potential saboteurs to Spain’s nascent democracy.

The Basque terrorist organization ETA had assassinated Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s Prime Minister and right-hand man, in 1973. His successor, Carlos Arias Navarro, shed tears on live television when announcing Franco’s death. Committed to keeping Francoism alive, Arias Navarro was an obstacle to democratization. In July 1976, Juan Carlos requested Arias Navarro’s resignation. He was replaced by Adolfo Suárez, an ideal ally to secure democratic evolution not revolution. Aged 43, his relative youth signalled a changing of the guard. But the fact he had been a politician and director of the state broadcaster under Franco reassured the more conservative sections of Spanish society.

When it came to the first general elections since before the Civil War in 1977, the King showed a complete lack of impartiality. Leaving nothing to chance, he wrote to the Shah of Iran and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia to request funds to support Suárez’s election campaign, playing up the then anti-monarchist Socialist Party’s Marxist credentials at a time when communism was a very clear and present danger to the status quo in the Middle East.

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Suárez won comfortably in 1977, but his popularity soon waned. With a challenging economic situation, and violence in the Basque Country, many Spaniards arrived at the conclusion that democracy wasn’t working. The 1979 general elections had the lowest turnout in recent Spanish history. Suárez narrowly defeated the Socialists who, under party leader Felipe González, then became less threatening by ditching references to Marxism from their party constitution. González and Juan Carlos had a shared interest in moving the Socialists towards the center, as well as sidelining the Communist Party as a major force on the Spanish Left. Opinion polls consistently stressed that the general public’s principal priority was stability, and avoiding another Civil War, as opposed to the installation of democracy. Juan Carlos was seen first as a guarantor of stability and, only later, of democracy. Paradoxically, his reputedly indispensable role in both respects meant that he was free of checks and balances, a hallmark of any genuinely democratic state.

Juan Carlos was, in more ways than one, a hands-on monarch. Amadeo Martínez Inglés, a retired member of the military turned amateur historical sleuth, calculates that the Emeritus King has had 4,786 lovers, peaking with 2,154 between 1976 and 1984. Amid political turmoil, Juan Carlos’s playboy lifestyle rivalled that of Julio Iglesias (who would, some years later, gift him a lion cub, named “Hey” in honour of a signature song written about the romantic crooner’s ex-wife). The Spanish public was last year captivated by newly unearthed audios and photographs that seemingly confirmed long-standing rumours of Juan Carlos’s affair with Bárbara Rey, a vedette.

A mixture of gratitude and fear protected Juan Carlos from public scrutiny for many years. The transition, both at home and abroad, has traditionally been construed as Spain’s success story, the suture of the wounds of a bitterly fratricidal conflict, which cleared the way for the country’s belated modernization and European integration. In many respects, 1981 is a more important date than 1975 as regards the democratization process. For the six years following Franco’s death, a return to dictatorship was a genuine possibility, as the armed forces threatened to derail the new form of government which had left many Spaniards skeptical of the ability of democrats to run the country.

An attempted coup took place on 23 February 1981. It involved members of the Guardia Civil entering parliament, effectively holding democracy hostage, while tanks rolled onto the streets of Madrid and Valencia. The chief agitators claimed to be acting under the orders of Juan Carlos — we will possibly never know if there is any truth to their claims. A televised address from the King to his subjects, pledging his commitment to democracy, was instrumental to the coup failing. Skeptics of Juan Carlos’s democratic credentials have always asked why it took the King so long to address the nation; the televised address only took place after the coup had descended into farce. This remained a minority view until fairly recently, with footage of the King’s address shown on Spanish state television ad nauseam over the coming years. Young Spaniards were indoctrinated with the belief that potentially lethal threat to Europeanization had been averted through the fortitude and quick thinking of Juan Carlos, who steered the country towards a stable monarchical democracy, built on the bedrock of the free market and barring memories of the past from dictating the future. His private peccadillos were viewed as trifling in comparison with such exemplary public service.

The newly monarchical Socialist government, which won a landslide victory in the 1982 general elections under the party leadership of Felipe González, was the youngest in Europe, the first time the Generation of 1968 had been in charge of a major European government. When, in 2018, I interviewed González, the longest serving President of the democratic period, he emphasized the debt he and the general public had to the King for facilitating a transfer of powers to parliament. Many would beg to differ. A less picaresque figure than Juan Carlos would perhaps have been unable to midwife the transition, variously reassuring and playing off different factions of Spanish society. The issue is that he continued to act as a rogue and a rake when circumstances no longer demanded such qualities.

Juan Carlos’s instinct for measuring and manipulating the public mood deserted him with the crash of 2008. As millions of Spaniards lost their jobs, and struggled with mortgage repayments, the King considered divorcing Sofia to marry his long-term mistress, Corinna Larsen, with whom he was photographed on a hunting expedition in Botswana in 2012: all while citizens were still feeling the financial pain. Accounts differ as to what then ensued, but what we do know is that the Spanish secret services sought to persuade the German-Danish businesswoman to end the relationship, fearing that a scandal could rock the foundations of the state. She construed this as a threat.

When Larsen ended the relationship, Juan Carlos sought to recoup the millions he had lent and laundered through his mistress. She saw things differently and did not believe that her retaining funds were dependent on an ongoing romantic attachment. The Spanish press and the population were in no mood to mollycoddle the wayward Don Juan, who was now considered to be at the center of a corrupt establishment that let the country and its citizens down. An increasing number of Spaniards began to question the “great men” accounts of the transition.

In 2014, Juan Carlos was pressured into abdicating in favor of his son, Felipe VI. Fearing a potential overturning of the legal immunity granted to living monarchs, the Emeritus King sought refuge with his old political chums in the Arab world. On his occasional returns to Spain, he has been kept at a distance by his family.

Juan Carlos’s downfall is the consequence of not only his personal and political failings, but also a social structure that exalted a man with all too human foibles as almost God-like. The result is closer to farcical soap opera than classical tragedy — anagnorisis has been in short supply. It is difficult to see Juan Carlos as anything other than a foolish old man. What remains to be seen is whether he will be written into posterity as the hero or villain of modern Spanish democracy.

In yesterday’s election, which confirmed Vox as the country’s third-largest party, Spain came close to joining Hungary, Poland, Italy, Finland and Austria and electing a Right-populist party to government. In Germany, meanwhile, the AfD has just elected its first mayor and district administrator, after surging into second place in the polls; in the Netherlands, the newly formed Farmer-Citizen Movement won its first provincial elections in March; in Austria, the Freedom Party is leading the polls; and in France, polls suggest that Le Pen would now win a run-off with Macron.

This shift to the Right will no doubt affect the make-up of the next European Parliament, due to be elected next June. And Right-wingers across Europe are feeling giddy. At a recent rally in support of Vox, Giorgia Meloni couldn’t contain her glee, claiming that “the hour of the patriots has arrived”, announcing  “a change in the politics of Europe”.

It seems inevitable that Right-populism will play an increasingly influential role in the coming years. But exactly what kind of “change” should we expect from these “patriots”? From a cultural standpoint, such parties could not be further from the liberal-progressive mainstream: they share an attachment to Europe’s traditions and religious heritage, a dislike for eurocrats and an opposition to all things woke — immigration, gender ideology, green fanaticism. So we can definitely expect a pushback on these fronts, within individual countries as well as at the European level: more relaxed climate policies, more restrictive immigration policies and less talk about gender.

On other, arguably more important issues, however, these so-called populist parties are peculiarly aligned with the mainstream. In terms of economic policy, for example, almost all of them are wedded to the neoliberal orthodoxy embedded in the EU: with few exceptions, their economic agendas revolve around pro-austerity, pro-deregulation, anti-worker and anti-welfare policies.

Consider the new Finnish government’s economic programme, which includes wide-ranging welfare cuts, rules to make it easier for companies to lay off employees, limitations to the right of collective bargaining, and fines for workers on strikes. Similarly, Vox’s economic programme is rooted in what Miquel Vila has called “a special kind of Spanish neoliberalism [which favours] economic deregulation while supporting a conglomerate of big corporations dependent on government contracts”. The same (with slight variations) goes for several Right-populist parties — from Austria’s Freedom Party to the AfD to Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.

There are exceptions, of course. Le Pen, for instance, believes in a moderate redistributive programme of Keynesian orientation based on state interventionism, social protection and the defence of public services; in the past she has castigated the “neoliberal” logic of many of Macron’s proposals. Even Viktor Orbán’s economic policies — which have included capping the prices of basic goods in response to galloping inflation — have defied the orthodoxy in certain respects.

Yet overall, there is little reason to believe that this Right-populist wave will result in any major economic policy shift. And this is highly problematic, given most of the support for these parties doesn’t come from voters who are tired of wokeness — though that certainly plays a role — but from those who are anxious about their socioeconomic situation and lack of economic security. At a time when millions of Europeans are struggling with inflation and falling real wages, any party that wants to survive the next electoral cycle will also need to provide answers to the majority of voters who expect a material benefit from their vote. In this sense, the fact that most of these parties are wedded to the economic orthodoxy doesn’t bode well for their future — or that of the millions of Europeans struggling to get by.

That said, even those parties who would choose to defy the economic status quo have to contend with the very limited autonomy that countries have today, especially in the eurozone. This relates to an even more striking aspect of contemporary Right-populism: as much as they love to rail against the “Brussels bureaucrats” and the “globalist elites”, they have virtually all ditched any mention of leaving the EU and/or the euro from their programmes (to the extent that they ever made that claim). Nowadays, Right-populists are all euro-reformists who speak of “changing the EU” from within. This represents a significant change compared with the first European populist wave of the mid-2010s, when many of the then-leading populist parties — the National Front, the AfD, the Northern League, the Five Star Movement, even Brothers of Italy — openly called for their respective countries’ exit from the EU or euro.

This development was effectively formalised in July 2021, when all the major Right-populist parties from across Europe signed a document whereby they agreed to work within the framework of the EU. This inevitably entailed a shift in focus from socioeconomic issues — over which member states have little control over — to more cultural ones: by retreating from the battle for national sovereignty, they had little choice but to couch their challenges to the status quo, and to the EU itself, in strictly cultural and identitarian terms. Hence the document called for the need for European nations to “be based on tradition, respect for the culture and history of European states, respect for Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage and the common values that unite our nations”. The point is not whether one agrees with this or not, but rather the way in which the EU has succeeded in shifting opposition from the socioeconomic terrain to the identitarian one — in other words, to the culture wars.

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This emphasis was brought about by several factors, but a crucial one was the EU’s crushing response to the first populist government which attempted to challenge its rule: the League-Five Star government that emerged from the 2018 Italian elections. At the time, the EU resorted to a wide array of tools — including financial and political pressure — to prevent the government from deviating from the economic status quo, eventually causing the coalition to collapse in just over a year. The experience showed that the margins for an individual country to challenge the EU’s economic framework are close to zero — at least within the context of the euro.

From “nationalist” and “patriotic” parties allegedly devoted to taking back control from Brussels, one might have expected an increased awareness of the need to break away from the EU — something that Brexit had shown to be feasible. Instead, they reached the opposite conclusion: that the EU is so powerful that there is no alternative but to accept its existence. The tragic consequences of this are exemplified by the Meloni government: a nominally “sovereigntist” government which has no choice but to go along with the policies dictated by the European Union (and Nato), while engaging in empty culture-wars rhetoric. She symbolises the inevitable fate of Right-populism within the framework of the euro: that of becoming an anti-woke version of the economic mainstream.

Such hopes of changing the EU “from within” through the European elections are equally delusional. They might make sense if the EU were a fully-fledged federal state with a truly sovereign parliament. But it is not. In fact, the European Parliament has relatively limited powers: unlike national parliaments, it doesn’t even have the power to initiate legislation. This is a power reserved almost entirely for the EU’s “executive” arm, the European Commission, which is unelected and promises “neither to seek nor to take instructions from any government or from any other institution, body, office or entity”. And even though the European Parliament has the power to approve or reject (or propose amendments to) the Commission’s own legislative proposals, this doesn’t change the fact that it has relatively little control over the actions of the Commission. It has even less control over the European Central Bank, which ultimately exercises the power of life and death over euro area governments.

Yet even if economics were not a factor, there is a greater reason to be sceptical of the Right-populist wave’s life expectancy. On perhaps the most important issue concerning Europe’s future — the war in Ukraine and the bloc’s geopolitical positioning — the parties are deeply divided. Most Nordic, Baltic and Eastern parties, just like their mainstream equivalents, are strongly in favour of greater ties with Nato, though the same goes for Vox and Meloni. Then there are those who are strongly opposed and favour a renormalisation of relations with Russia — most notably Orbán, Le Pen and the Austrian Freedom Party. And then you have those which are deeply split on the issue, such as the AfD.

At their root, these divisions simply reflect the often divergent or even conflicting economic and geopolitical interests that characterise the EU’s member states. If the Right-populists think that these differences can be cancelled in the name of anti-wokeness — and synthesised into a common European policy — they are operating under the same Europhile delusion that the mainstream has been peddling for the past 30 years. Ultimately, there is only one project capable of delivering a truly populist agenda, in material and not simply cultural terms: one focused on reclaiming national sovereignty and democracy from the EU. It is a tragedy, then, that Europe’s Right-populists have all but given up the project.

There is a grain of truth in this. If the current Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wins, he will probably only be able to form a government with the backing of EH Bildu — a Basque separatist party that welcomes former terrorists from the now defunct but once dangerous ETA into its ranks. However, if the opposition People’s Party (PP) of Alberto Núñez Feijóo wins, it will need the support of Vox — a hard-Right party that attracts national conservatives and authoritarians. Some of its supporters remain in thrall to the thuggish military dictator Francisco Franco.

Bildu and Vox each claim to be devoted democrats, but most Spaniards strongly dislike both — and with good reason. Vox leader Santiago Abascal has called Sánchez’s government “the worst in 80 years”, suggesting that he prefers Franco’s violently repressive autocracy. His party hopes to repeal abortion and euthanasia laws, end measures to ensure gender equality and combat domestic violence, and re-centralise power to Madrid.

The reputation of EH Bildu leader Arnaldo Otegi is even less flattering. The ETA veteran has only semi-apologised for the group’s murder of 853 people between 1968 and 2011. Having vowed to “alleviate” the suffering of the victims’ relatives in 2021, he then humiliated them by putting forward 44 former convicts at local elections in May 2023. These included seven candidates condemned for murder or for directly assisting murder.

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While Spain’s mainstream parties would rather avoid such unseemly bedfellows, it seems they will have little choice: the People’s Party will likely win the most votes but fall short of an absolute majority. In that case, it will have no option but to turn to Vox. The party has no other potential allies: its dismissive stance on devolution and independence referenda has alienated nationalists from the Basque Country and Catalonia, who might otherwise have been sympathetic to its Christian Democrat agenda. Indeed, ever since Catalan separatists tried to secede unilaterally in 2017, the split between unionists and centralists has often dominated politics just as much as traditional Left-Right alignments.

If Feijóo’s PP and Vox fail to win a majority of seats, then Sánchez — whose party has long followed a conciliatory policy of devolution without independence — will form a minority coalition government with far-Left Sumar (a tweaked version of current coalition ally Unidas Podemos) backed by all the nationalist and separatist parties. That includes five or so deputies from EH Bildu. Nevertheless, although the polls are still too tight to call a winner, a People’s Party-Vox coalition is still the most probable outcome.

The election campaign has become all about the kingmakers. “Take the vote of Txapote!” (an infamous ETA chief currently jailed for several murders) is a favourite PP slogan targeting Sánchez’s Socialists. “Vote against the pact of hate!” shouts a massive scaffolding banner in Madrid’s famously gay Chueca district, claiming a PP-Vox coalition would shred women’s rights and fuel homophobia.

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By Thomas Fazi

What frantic political slogans fail to acknowledge is that whichever side wins, Spain is not about to be sucked into a whirlwind of insanely radical government. EH Bildu and Vox may make headlines, but in reality they have very little influence. Support for Vox has in fact shrunk to below 13%, from 15% in 2019 elections. EH Bildu, meanwhile, represents fewer than 1.5% of Spaniards. By comparison, the People’s Party and the Socialists are large, resilient and moderate parties — European-style Christian or Social Democrats who have run all of Spain’s governments for four decades. Some think the most logical coalition would actually be between them, creating a German-style “grand coalition”. Of course, entrenched bad blood makes that impossible, but minority allies are unlikely to force larger parties to adopt truly radical policies.

The reasons for this lie in the strength of Spain’s 1978 constitution, designed three years after Franco’s death to prevent a return to radicalism. Any significant change requires a two-third parliamentary majority, which can only be found by combining the votes of both People’s Party and the Socialists. As a result, there have only been two amendments in the last 45 years, both to please the European Union. (In comparison, France’s Fifth Republic has amended its 1958 constitution 24 times, and Germany’s Basic Law has had 62 changes since 1949.)

The constitution proved its worth in 2017, when Catalan regional leader Carles Puigdemont made his unilateral declaration of independence. The Constitutional Court proclaimed Puigdemont’s so-called referendum — which most Catalans boycotted — illegal, and the main secessionists were jailed or fled into exile. Since then, the separatist balloon has deflated. EH Bildu faces a similar problem, with support for Basque independence, which has never grown above 50%, waning in the face of a constitution that declares the “indissoluble unity” of the Spanish nation.

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Yet those on the far-Right who imagine the constitution is their friend are equally misguided. Even if Vox gets into power, it will struggle to pass many of its more radical policies. Its call to recentralise Spain’s 17 semi-autonomous regional governments would require rewriting a constitution that enshrines the “right to autonomy” of the country’s regions. Elsewhere, as the constitutional scholar Ana Carmona Contreras points out, other Vox proposals such as striking out the abortion law or banning separatist parties are similarly made impracticable under the constitution.

In the face of inevitable failure, Vox will likely devote its energy to culture warfare instead. Expect chest-thumping about Spanish history — especially the conquistadores in the Americas and other “deeds and feats of our national heroes” — as well as attempts to revive the flagging fortunes of professional bull-fighting with public money. (Its manifesto also takes a dig at “New Bauhaus” architecture, a dislike uncomfortably close to that of Adolf Hitler.) Otherwise, Vox’s influence will be reduced to encouraging a People’s Party government to uphold its economic principles: cutting taxes and shrinking the state.

In other words, Vox is destined to share the fate of far-Left party Podemos, whose role in Sánchez’s outgoing coalition shows how slight the impact of small, radical partners can be. Podemos’s headline reform to employment law, and its support for minimum wage hikes, hardly challenge the standard aims of social democracy.

The main policy mistake Podemos will be remembered for wasn’t intended to be radical. Its clumsily written 2022 rape law allowed some sex offenders to leave jail early. It was, however, a well-meant response to a horrific gang rape during the San Fermin fiestas in Pamplona in 2016 — but it left a loophole open to be exploited. “Sánchez put hundreds of monsters back on the streets,” a Vox campaign poster shouts. That may be true, but there is little radical about the law itself.

Much like Podemos, Vox will struggle to push through its radical agenda. Those watching this weekend’s election for signs of a neo-fascist revival are therefore likely to be disappointed. Unlike much of Europe, Spain’s revolutionary days are over; few European countries offer as much political stability as Spain has over the past four decades. Vox may try to whitewash Franco, but Spaniards learned much from an era of civil war and dictatorship. They won’t be going back.

Among other measures, the authors of this new “democratic memory” law, which was finally passed in September, planned to remove some of the 34,000 corpses from Spain’s biggest civil war cemetery at the controversial Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid. Hence the threat of a private prosecution alleging body-snatching, or what Americans call “corpse theft”, brought by Franco’s ultra-Catholic supporters.

The disinterring of bodies should start later this year, so no body-snatching cases have yet been brought, but Spain is shaping up for a bruising history war in 2023. Franco died in 1975, almost half a century ago. So, why bother now?

Blatant government meddling in history is more easily associated with totalitarians than democrats, but it can cut both ways. Poland’s illiberal Law and Justice party, for example, uses its Institute of National Remembrance to implement “decommunisation” laws (the last one from 2017) that purge monuments, monsters and memory from its time in the Soviet bloc.

Yet Spain remains a special case. A country that never properly confronted its dark 20th-century history is trying to play catch up. The problem is that this comes too late.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Spain tried to forget the brutality of his regime. Fear that his military henchmen would strangle the country’s new democracy in its cradle meant that Franco’s people got a free pass, formalised by a 1977 amnesty law. There were no trials or truth commissions for up to 170,000 people killed off the civil war battlefields in the Thirties, or for the victims of four decades of state repression.

A new democratic Right led by former Francoist ministers wanted a complete break and moderates on the Left agreed. “There were implicit and explicit agreements. One was that we Spaniards don’t want to look to the past,” the first elected Right-wing prime minister, José María Aznar, declared two decades later.

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Historians did their research, but schools, media and politicians stayed away. It became known as the “pact of forgetting”. If the past stank, the logic ran, why stick your nose into it?

Yet the smell lingers. Nowhere is it more fetid than in the gloomy, musty troglodyte basilica tunnelled out by Franco at the Valley of the Fallen, in the mountains 40 miles north of Madrid. This 260-metre long underground chamber is both a place of worship and home to those 34,000 war dead, whose bodies are hidden away in damp, crumbling chambers that no one can visit.

The new law wrests control of the site away from the Church, returning it to the state and formally erasing its name since this was imposed by Franco. He claimed to be honouring all the fallen of the war, but the fascistic iconography inside the basilica praises only his side. The “fallen” were stage props; the only visitable graves were Franco’s own, and that of the ideologue of the fascist Falange party that backed him, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Little surprise, then, that the valley has had its ancient, pre-Franco place-name of Cuelgamuros restored.

Since the basilica took until 1959 to build, the dead of both sides of the civil war (1936-1939) were dug up from elsewhere, sometimes to the horror of their families — who will now be able to recover and rebury them closer to home (180 of them have already requested this).

A Benedictine monastery, hidden behind a granite outcrop topped by a 150-metre high stone cross, will also be closed. That sounds like an attack on religion, but we need not be fooled by the monks. For decades after Franco’s death, they said masses in his name and lobbied for the man whose doctrine became known as “national Catholicism” to be canonised.

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On the November anniversary of his death, they would hand the basilica over to European fascists who sang their anthems and indulged in chilling, stiff-armed revelry of a kind unimaginable in any other place of worship outside of Putin’s Russia. That continued for four decades — and I occasionally went to watch —regardless of the fact that the monument belongs to the state.

Under the new law, public Francoist symbols and street names must be removed, or fines paid. The state will search for and disinter death squad victims from their often-secret graves and, in a symbolic gesture, strike out the sentences — some carried out by firing squad — which Franco’s retroactive justice imposed on elected officials of the democracy he overthrew.

Much else is also symbolic. Titles and medals awarded by Franco have been taken away. His victims will be listed and named. A DNA bank will allow relatives of those still missing to help identify the remaining corpses. Democratic memory will be taught at school — although no one knows how.

Since the Francoists are now all dead or doddery, there is little else to do. Nor is this the first attempt at dealing with the past. The 1977 amnesty was followed by a tepid “historical memory” law in 2007, which carried no sanctions, refused to name perpetrators of regime abuses and left governments to fund fieldwork, or not (Right-wing governments cut funds off when in power).

Such laws are usually passed to overcome recent trauma. When they arrive late, they risk failure. In his 2016 polemic, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, David Rieff claimed they could even make things worse: “Remembrance may be the ally of justice, but, despite the conventional wisdom of the human rights movement, it is no reliable friend to peace, whereas forgetting can and at times has played such a role.”

Rieff produces some powerful arguments, not least the way genocidal Serb nationalists in the former Yugoslavia justified their cruelty by referring to the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. In Spain’s case, however, peace is not at risk. “Forgetting is not an option in democracy,” the law states.

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Shortly after Spain’s new law was passed, the Argentine-Spanish tech entrepreneur and investor Martin Varsavsky found himself at a Madrid dinner party arguing that Franco had been a uniformly bad thing. His was a lone voice; none of the other guests agreed. “Eleven people defending Franco against me arguing that on top of being a terrible dictatorship Franco kept Spain in the stone ages of social, political and economic development for 39 years,” Varsavsky tweeted.

Varsavsky was dining with that part of conservative Madrid society which believes a modest middle class that emerged from Francoism went on to “save” Spain from its long history of confrontation, backwardness and chaos by setting up democracy — and that the dictator should be thanked. This conveniently turns Franco’s winners and collaborationists (including, I suspect, the families of some dinner guests) into heroes.

Varsavsky may have been alone, but he was right. Franco overthrew an elected government, wrecked the economy and provoked half a million deaths. His war saw brutality on both sides, but the excuse that he saved Spain from political turmoil and a communist takeover is a lazy game of counterfactual history. Even today, few Spaniards realise that — despite a belated spurt of catch-up growth that is still presented as proof of overall brilliance — Francoism was an economic failure, pushing Spain further behind other southern European nations such as Italy (Spain’s per capita GDP, in relative terms to Italy, fell by a fifth during Franco’s years in power).

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Given that there is barely anyone left to recompense or punish, Spain’s new law is very much about the present. In what its authors undoubtedly saw as a dig against Spain’s newly successful far-Right party Vox, the law aims “to avoid the repetition of any kind of political violence or totalitarianism”. Among other things, it lures opponents into the trap of defending Franco, just because they dislike socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his coalition government with far-Left Podemos. “It is an ideologically-driven law that reopens the hatreds of the Civil War,” the leader of the moderate Right-wing People’s Party, Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, complains.

In fact, the law missed out on creating the best space for reconciliation — a national civil war museum where Spaniards could understand the horror and debate what it all meant, or still means. Spain has nothing of the kind. Civil war battle sites are either ignored or, worse still, built over.

The Valley of the Fallen, now Cuelgamuros, is the perfect place for that museum. Franco, whose own body was removed from its place of honour in the basilica by Sánchez’s government in 2018, cynically claimed he had built it to be a place of reconciliation. Fifty years later, an opportunity has been missed to make it exactly that.

Reports suggest it will be a prequel — the action taking place long before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But luckily Tolkien’s wizards and elves are more or less immortal, meaning that some familiar characters may be appearing as their younger selves. I wouldn’t be surprised if another ‘character’ makes an appearance too: the One Ring.

Arguably the most famous piece of jewellery in all of fiction, the Ring is not only a brilliant plot device, capable of linking events that take place centuries apart; it is also the focus of one of Tolkien’s most important themes: power.

Unlike his friend C.S. Lewis, Tolkien was not fond of allegorical fiction. He had no time for the idea that the Ring — extremely dangerous but hard to get rid of — was an allegory of the atomic bomb. Rather, it was exactly what he said it was: an embodiment of power and the corrupting effects of power.

Tolkien shows us that the only people who can be trusted with great power are those who don’t really want it — or who do, but have the moral strength to reject it. Even then, it’s touch-and-go, the burden of responsibility taking a terrible toll on the reluctant bearer.

Numerous commentaries have been written on this aspect of the story — often summed up by the Lord Acton quote: “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Which is true enough. But Tolkien was onto a whole lot more than that…

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Let’s begin at the beginning. The Ring was made at great cost to Sauron, its creator. He poured much of his own strength into an external object — one from which he could be separated, which in due course he was. So why take the risk? Sauron, though evil, was possessed of great cunning — why did he expose himself to such a vulnerability? Did old JRR just not think it through? Does the Ring actually represent a massive hole in the plot?

Not a bit of it. When you understand what Tolkien understood about the nature of power, it all makes perfect sense.

In a letter, he once wrote that the Ring was a “mythological way of presenting the truth that potency… if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalised and so as it were passed, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control.” This is a crucial insight into the way Tolkien understood power to work.

Power in politics is like power in physics: always on the move, a flow not an object. That’s why holding on to power is so difficult — literally so, in the case of electricity. We can generate, transmit and consume vast quantities of the stuff. However, unlike other resources — such as water or grain or coal — it’s very difficult to store in any great quantity.

If only it weren’t. For one thing we’d be able to save up electricity generated in the summer months, when demand is low, for use in the winter. Unfortunately electrons are energy not matter. We can’t stack them up like logs in a woodpile. The closest we can get are rechargeable batteries — but those are limited by the cost of capacity. The best hope for affordable long-term storage lies in using surplus power to make a fuel, like hydrogen, which can then be used to generate electricity at a future date — in other words, the best way to hold onto electrical power is to convert energy into matter and back again.

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Which brings us to back to the One Ring. It can be seen as power in material form — power you can hold onto, ready to be used as and when required. To a power-mad being like Sauron — unwilling to rule within limits — forging the Ring was a smart move.

Here’s another analogy: think of the difference between cashflow and capital. If all you have is cashflow — money which you spend as soon as you earn it — then any interruption leaves you helpless. It doesn’t matter how rich you were up until that point.

However, if you save a portion of your income, then you accumulate capital. And that gives you options — not only a reserve to fall back on, but also a means of boosting one’s own economic power and of acquiring control over that of others.

So that was what the One Ring was to Sauron: an investment of his magical power. You might still think he was foolish to put it all into a single object, small enough to lose down the back of a sofa; but his investment was protected. For a start, the Ring was virtually indestructible. Furthermore, it was so imbued with the identity of its creator that it had a kind of homing instinct, should it get lost. And then there was the effect it had on anyone coming into contact with it.

When energy becomes matter, it acquires mass. Enough mass in one place has a warping effect on time and space, which generates gravity, pulling other things towards it. There’s a parallel process in finance. Great accumulations of capital can distort entire economies. Certainly, they exert a gravitational pull: money comes to money and the rich get richer.

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In parallel fashion, the Ring — as a great accumulation of power — enabled Sauron to bend the will of others to his own. In seeking to exalt themselves, they became his slaves.

*

Of course, we’re talking about magical power here — in a fictional, fantasy world. But Tolkien’s story is highly relevant to the real world, where power is political.

Most of the time political power is merely exercised. Successful politicians get the chance to direct the flow of power — but only for a while. They are either in power or out of it, and when you’re out, there really is nothing left of what you had. As is sometimes said in Westminster, “there’s nothing more ex than an ex-MP”.

Sometimes, however, power is invested — poured into some external but enduring form. I don’t mean an Ozymandian statue left broken and lifeless in the desert, but something still thrumming with influence — perhaps even long after the death of its creator.

The Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975. His authoritarian regime did not long outlive him and democracy was soon restored. In 1940, however, Franco ordered that work begin on a vast project — the Valley of the Fallen, which was a memorial to the dead of the Spanish Civil War and supposedly an “act of national atonement”. It took two decades to complete, with some of the work done by prisoners. The site consists of a complex of buildings — including a Benedictine abbey, a basilica and a 500 foot high stone cross.

To its many critics, the bleak grandiosity of the complex suggests an apparently Christian monument possessed by the spirit of Fascism. And though meant to honour the dead of the Civil War, it also contains the tomb of someone who did not die in the conflict: Franco himself.

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The Valley of the Fallen is still a focal point of intense controversy. Spanish governments have gone to great lengths to stop the site being used as a rallying point for Francoist sympathisers – and debate rages as to how the monument can be re-invented.

However, there’s no question of pulling it down like those statues of Lenin after the fall of the Soviet Union. The physical challenge alone would be enormous – the basilica is literally built into a mountain. It is also consecrated ground — a place of worship and the final resting place of 40,000 of the fallen, including some from the Republican side. Whether or not Franco’s remains are moved elsewhere (as the current Spanish government wishes to do), the monument is embedded in the substance and memory of the nation.

*

An investment of power doesn’t always have to take an architectural form. It can be something more diffuse than that. In the back story to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien tells us that, in addition to the One Ring, 19 subsidiary ‘Rings of Power’ were created and distributed among the movers-and-shakers of Middle Earth. The recipients thought they were getting a free gift; in reality they were plugging themselves into a network under the ultimate control of the One Ring, which Sauron retained for himself.

Now can you think of anything like that in our own world? A networked service whose benefits are given away for nothing and yet which amply repays the ‘generosity’ of those who control it? Doesn’t that sound like certain big tech companies one could mention? I’m not saying that Mark Zuckerberg is Sauron, just that the business model of Mordor isn’t entirely unknown in Silicon Valley.

Though we’re not forced by law to use social media, the technology is so enmeshed in the way we live that it’s getting harder to do without it. And that’s without taking into account its addictive qualities. Even when we don’t actually need it, we wants it. Yesss, we do, my precious. Now, where did I put my phone?

*

Another way of solidifying power is through constitutions and treaties. Unlike ordinary laws that can be passed and repealed by whoever happens to be in power at the time, constitutions and treaties are intended to have a binding effect – perhaps lasting for generations. Such arrangements can provide a foundation for fundamental rights or a predictable set of rules for international trade; but beyond a certain point they begin to crowd out the normal democratic process – and the need of governments to seek and renew a mandate from the governed.

Of course, constitutions can be amended and treaties abrogated. But when they’re allowed to proliferate and entangle themselves around the life of a nation, breaking free of their binding power can only come at great cost. It is what the Greeks found out in the Eurozone crisis and what the British are finding out as we struggle through Brexit.

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The EU and its project of ever-closer union is nothing if not an attempt to accumulate power, acquired from sovereign states and deposited layer by layer. It represents decades of political investment, initiatives taken and compromises made – often with the best of intentions.

One has to understand how those who have invested so much for so long feel about the idea of throwing it all away. However, so much power solidified in one place exerts a force that disrupts everything around it – and so one must also understand the motivations of those who wish to resist.

The stars of the EU flag represent the coming together of nations. But one can’t help but notice the shape that they form.

Pedro Sanchez, the incumbent Socialist prime minister, is putting on a brave face and proclaiming victory. “We’ve won the election and we’re going to work for a progressive government,” he told party supporters in Madrid as results arrived on Sunday night. But his position has been corroded in a country that looks even more polarised and politically-paralysed than before. So what are the wider lessons of this latest election debacle?

1. Election gambles are high-risk in volatile political climates

Theresa May might have warned Sanchez to be wary of rolling the dice to break political deadlock after her election debacle in 2017. However, like Boris Johnson in this country, Sanchez felt he had little choice but to chance his luck at the polls. He remains the most likely candidate for prime minister. But he has failed to resolve the crisis of government in the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy after a ballot that left several losers but one big winner —  Vox, the far-right force that has more than doubled its seats in parliament to become the nation’s third-biggest party.

If you play with fire, you are liable to get burned — especially when raising the ghost of Franco by exhuming his remains and the spectre of separatism stalks a land still badly scarred by the financial crash a decade ago.

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2. Traditional two-party politics is breaking down

The Socialists topped the poll for the second time this year — but fell short of winning a workable majority. Sanchez’s party slid back three seats, leaving it 56 short of a majority in parliament, while the conservative Popular Party closed the gap after gaining 22 seats on their historic low in April. Nonetheless it still has less than half the number needed to rule on its own.

These dismal results show how traditional parties of Left and Right, which dominated Spanish politics for four decades after the restoration of democracy in the mid-seventies, are floundering as new parties rise around them. The two parties which used to routinely scoop up eight in 10 votes at elections collected less than half the total vote on Sunday. Three parties were fighting for votes on the Right and three more on the Left.

Spain is far from unique. Political duopolies are being ripped apart across Europe as traditional parties struggle to retain power. We saw this in Britain two years ago when May threw away the Tory majority, leaving her forced to bribe the Democratic Unionist Party to stay in Downing Street, and then a few months later in Germany, when the main parties suffered their worst results for almost seven decades. These historic coalitions are struggling as nationalism rises on the right, identity politics consumes much of the Left and technology exerts its disruptive power. Austerity and environmental issues are also reshaping political landscapes. In Germany, political fragmentation means 13 different coalitions govern its 16 federal states.

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3. Polarised political systems can be left paralysed

Spain’s election has simply fuelled uncertainty. Parties on the Left won 158 seats, while the Right took a combined 150 seats, leaving both significantly short of a majority. Sanchez looks the most likely prime minister but creating a functioning coalition appears harder than before. “Forming a government looked complicated in April – now it is an inscrutable hieroglyph,” was the El Pais verdict.

It may take months to sort a coalition deal, yet this is becoming commonplace in European democracies. Belgium famously went 541 days without a government after an election in June 2010. More recently, Holland and Sweden have endured months of stasis after inconclusive elections. Two elections in Israel this year failed to deliver stability. Meanwhile Britain’s election is intended to break a Brexit logjam that has stymied parliament, reflecting the divisions in the country inflamed by the 2016 referendum — although some fear it could prove as inconclusive the Spanish contest.

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4. Populism remains a powerful force

There were some hopeful suggestions recently Europe had reached peak populism after liberal lawyer Zuzana Caputova became Slovakia’s first female president, the Austrian far-right crashed after being snared in a corruption scandal, and the ultra-nationalist League in Italy, led by selfie-loving Matteo Salvini, was thrown out of government. But in recent weeks we have seen the anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland chalk up some of its best results in German state elections and now this astonishing surge by Vox in Spain.

Many analysts used to argue Spain was the “European exception” —  immune to such populism since nationalist dictatorship was such a recent and painful memory in the country. But Santiago Abascal has managed to establish Vox as a significant force in Spain after winning more than 15% of the vote, ensuring a party only six years old that entered parliament for the first time in April now breathes down the neck of the PP.

Vox exploited the tensions over Catalonia with calls for a tough response, appealing to young male voters, while polling showed a rise in support when Franco’s remains were finally exhumed last month. Vox is an ultra-conservative force, defending bull-fighting while attacking political correctness, but like other populist parties, it ramps up hostility to migration as seen in its calls for a wall around Spanish enclaves in north Africa. “We have managed to open up all the prohibited debates,” said Abascal.

And just like far-right counterparts across the continent, its rise is dragging other parties on the Right away from the centre as it presents existential challenges for traditional conservatives. “Vox’s rise creates a serious dilemma for PP: facilitate a Socialist-led government, which would leave the centre-right party vulnerable to Vox‘s attacks, or going to another election with Vox on the rise,” tweeted analyst Antonio Barroso.

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5. But populists suffer when confronted by political reality

There were two big losers in Sunday’s election. Ironically, they were the two parties that sparked the country’s political crisis with their rise in 2015, which reshaped Spanish politics by challenging the long hegemony of traditional parties. But now the hard-left Podemos, much admired by Jeremy Corbyn, has fewer than half of the 71 seats it held at the start of the year while its centre-right rival, Ciudadanos, has collapsed from 57 to 10 seats, forcing its leader to quit.

They show the difficulties of sustaining a democratic insurgency, especially when based on politics of resentment. The fall of Podemos is especially fascinating, demonstrating what happens when ideological purity confronts pragmatism of everyday politics. This party emerged five-years ago from huge anti-austerity protests in a nation badly wounded by the financial meltdown and bursting of a housing bubble, which still suffers very high youth unemployment. Pablo Iglesias, its charismatic pony-tailed leader, promised to transform politics and came close to stealing the crown of Spain’s left from Sanchez. Then came infighting, fragmentation and bitter rows over compromises in local government. Now it looks significantly diminished.

Pro-business Ciudadanos could not be more different ideologically, but it also hoped to exploit the country’s discredited old politics. Instead it has been humiliated after crumbling from third place to sixth. This group began as a regional party in Catalonia, founded by anti-independence activists, then sought to capitalise on huge corruption staining the PP. Ciudadanos rose rapidly, winning one in seven voters in 2015 but has now shrunk back to be smaller than the Catalan Republican Left in parliament after a disastrous few months. First it refused to negotiate with Sanchez over a governing agreement, then foolishly tried to compete with Vox by tacking hard Right, triggering a spate of resignations from senior officials. Its leader, Albert Rivera, who once posed naked in a campaign poster, has resigned.

New politics does not take long to look like old politics.

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6. Democracy is left looking dysfunctional

In June 2015 — after the first of this recent quartet of elections — exit polls predicted Podemos had broken the mould and beaten the Socialists. Then the results came in and crushed their hopes. After this latest verdict of Spanish voters, Iglesias insisted that “the only way to stop the far-right in Spain is to have a stable government”.

He is right. Yet this concept of strong and stable government (to coin a familiar phrase) looks further off then ever in Spain after a result that leaves democracy looking dysfunctional again as it struggles to adapt to a fast-changing world. Studies have shown dwindling support in Western nations for the world’s most successful form of government as populists in various hues exploit electoral and economic dissatisfaction. Spain is just one more nation on our polarised continent struggling to find a path through these tempestuous political storms.

It was a good story with a positive message, and survived largely unchallenged for many years. But things are changing dramatically in Spain — or rather, are reverting back to type — and the narrative of the Transición, as it’s called, is losing momentum. The past, with all its horrors and threats of bloodshed to come, is back. Because it never really went away.

A full list of the deep problems currently facing the country would take up far too much space, but it includes the devalued reputation of the monarchy, hard hit by a string of scandals; an economy still struggling to pick itself up after the 2008 crash; an increasing gap between rich and poor; a shift towards weak, short-lived governments; a polarisation of the political spectrum including the rapid rise of a far-Right party; and a seemingly endemic culture of large-scale corruption among the political class.

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All of this has greatly tarnished Spain’s image and self-belief over the past decade. But nowhere are the cracks more apparent than in the Catalan crisis, now flaring up once again following the sentencing this week of nine separatist leaders in the wake of the illegal referendum on regional independence in October 2017.

Reaction around the world to those scenes two years ago was one of shock and disbelief. Spanish riot police went in hard, using brute force in an attempt to shut the referendum down. Images of baton-wielding officers beating would-be voters were seen by millions, and outside Spain there was a collective intake of breath. How could something like this be taking place in a liberal Western democracy? Surely we don’t do things like this anymore?

But the problem was to fall into the trap of thinking that Spain actually had changed, to believe the yarn spun by the story of the Transición that she was now somehow different. A long view of the country’s history reveals that old problems and divisions never really go away in Spain; they simply fall into abeyance every now again, only to re-emerge, in a slightly different guise, yet essentially the same. And the Catalan situation is a very good example.

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It is often overlooked that after Switzerland, Spain is the most mountainous country in Europe, and mountainous countries are notoriously difficult to unite and govern (Switzerland only succeeds by being a decentralised federation of cantons). Spanish geography itself, therefore, both gives a clear sense of national identity on the one hand through the distinct landmass that is the Iberian Peninsula (pace Portugal), but also pulls against this by dividing the peoples within between the numerous sierras which cross the landscape like castle walls.

Because of this there are five official languages in a country of only 40 million people, and there are no words to the national anthem because no one can agree what they should be. “Spanishness” is something which is deeply felt by most of the country’s inhabitants, but is impossible to define. The upshot of this is that several attempts have been made to delineate it through what it is or was not.

This search for identity through a negative can be seen clearly in Spain’s patron saint, Santiago — St James the Great. From the Middle Ages onwards this senior Disciple of Christ is commonly portrayed not in Biblical guise but as a horse-riding man of violence: as Matamoros, the “Moor-Slayer”. And by mythically slaughtering Muslim Spaniards on the battlefields of the so-called Reconquista, Santiago gave the many disparate kingdoms of Christian Spain something around which they could potentially cohere: not being Muslim. “Spanishness” was effectively constructed around “not being Moorish”.

But while the iconography of Matamoros focuses specifically on his eradication of Spanish Muslims, the role he symbolises can refer to the crushing of any group or community which potentially threatens an essentially Catholic, unified vision of the country. So everyone from Jews to Protestants, liberals, Enlightenment thinkers, socialists, anarchists and many others have been pushed out or annihilated over the centuries in the spirit which he embodies.

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During the Civil War of the 1930s, Franco followed this tendency wholeheartedly by describing his Republican opponents simply as “the anti-Spain”. Over half a million of his compatriots died during the conflict, while another half a million fled into exile when it ended.

And today, as in the past, no one is more guaranteed to raise the hackles of the country’s militant patron saint than a regional group attempting to become independent. Spain — always a work in progress at best, and which has broken up and been put back together several times over many centuries — is viewed by supporters of national unity as la España eterna, “Eternal Spain”, as though created by the Almighty Himself. And to threaten this is not only viewed as something akin to heresy, but also heightens passions to a degree which is not commonly understood by observers abroad.

This particular divide — between centralism and a pull to the regions — has been at the heart of all of Spain’s multiple civil wars, from what we erroneously call “the Spanish Civil War” (as though there had only ever been one) of the 1930s, through the innumerable conflicts of the 19th century, the Segadors Catalan rebellion of the mid-16th century and beyond. In truth every century in Spanish history, for well over a thousand years, has seen at least one major civil conflict (in 1873 alone there were two different ones taking place simultaneously on the Spanish mainland, while a third raged in the colony of Cuba).

And while the causes change, there is always, at one level, this fundamental question: should the country unite, or break apart? For the truth is that “Spain” has only ever been created and held together by the use of force. Other methods have been tried — most recently with the narrative of the Transición — but these only enjoy short-term success at best.

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The news from Spain is currently filled with references to the past. The government is preparing to dig Franco up from his mountain mausoleum north of Madrid; conservative politicians talk of possible “church-burnings” to come in the future, in a reference to events from the 1930s; the far-Right Vox party launch a recent election campaign in Covadonga, site of the mythical first battle of the “Reconquista” in 722; even the defeat of Habsburg-supporting Barcelona in the 18th-century War of Spanish Succession is a cornerstone of today’s arguments about Catalan independence.

Not a day goes by without history somehow making the headlines. The past is on the march, which means that Spain today has a stark choice: between national unity and democracy. Her own history dictates that she cannot have both. True democracy, by its very nature, is not authoritarian enough to hold the country together. The frequently hardline response from Madrid to the Catalan situation shows that when it comes to the crunch, national unity usually prevails. Anything else is a vote-loser, and with yet another general election scheduled for November the country feels weakened and in danger of returning to the well-trodden routes of old.

Can the 21st century buck the trend, or will the coming years see another civil conflict flare up? It’s in the hands of the Spanish themselves to try, once and for all, to break the habits of their history.

Jason Webster’s Violencia: A New History of Spain — Past, Present and the Future of the West is published by Constable

Let me just come out and say it. Decadent proclivities brought me to The House of Ulloa. My initiation took place in New Cross, South London, at an academic conference where the souvenir tote bags depicted the Goat of Mendes cavorting with a tortoise. In rooms at the Stuart Hall building of Goldsmiths College, guests of the Decadence Research Unit gave papers on the literature of auras, telepathy, astral projection and Satanism.

A South Korean Shakespeare professor talked about tantric philosophy and W. B. Yeats’s vasectomy. A dapper Swedish lecturer in religion spoke of Méphistophéla (1890), a French novel in which lesbian demon-worshippers offer baskets of severed penises to a female succubus. A Spanish researcher, Leire Barrera-Medrano, described the fiction of Emilio Pardo Bazán, decadent, feminist, theosophist, aristocrat and the author of The Black Siren (1908), the story of a devil-worshipping dandy with the power to compel people to commit suicide.

I was reeling. Suddenly, Proust’s mental time travel and Freud’s interest in telepathy made sense. Here was the lost, weird context of European modernism. Most of it, frustratingly, untranslated into English.

With one notable exception. Emilio Pardo Bazán’s The House of Ulloa (1886). A novel from her early period, written long before she developed an interest in hypnotism and the Black Mass. Back in the 1880s, she considered herself a naturalist in the style of Flaubert. But she was also a state of the nation novelist. That nation was her native Spain, and its state was decay.

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The hero of The House of Ulloa is a mimsy young priest, Father Julián Alvarez, who is despatched to a crumbling estate in the Galician sticks to inject a little order and piety into the affairs of its resident marquis. Some hope.

As he arrives at the manor like a comic, clerical version of Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Dracula, he sees a dirty four-year-old boy, the marquis’s illegitimate son, being bitten by a dog from whose bowl he has attempted to snatch a hunk of meat. The marquis consoles the lad by sluicing wine down his throat. The boy seems delighted to be drunk. “On certain feast-days,” stammers Father Julián, wondering if he is about to witness a sudden death, “I don’t dislike a little anisette with my coffee.”

Like many great novels, it’s possible to read The House of Ulloa for the food. Bazán doesn’t mind tarrying in the kitchen. Her flavours are strong and she gives us all the details. Chicken casseroled in an egg-yolk sauce. Cauliflower salad and quince jelly sent in from the local convent. Mataburrillo, a stew of goat’s tripe, liver and lungs. Bread soup, cooked slowly in fat with red sausage, chickpeas and sliced hard-boiled eggs.

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The political background, though, is just as piquant. We’re in a period of turmoil and uncertainty. The Glorious Revolution of 1868 has propelled Queen Isabella II from the Spanish throne. A Provisional Government has been formed. Its Prime Minister, Juan Prim, has been shot by an unknown assassin. Radicals have declared a republic, brought swiftly to an end by the installation of Isabella’s son, Alfonso XII, as constitutional monarch. Local politicians – as far as Bazán is concerned – are hopelessly self-interested. Spain is sinking into a post-imperial dream-state, while these men manoeuvre for power.

A pair of figures receive Bazán’s cool attention. Barbacana is a lawyerly bigwig who fights his battles from behind a desk, leaving the violent stuff to a wall-eyed henchman from Castrodorna. (Clearly bandit territory.)

The more dangerous of the two is Trampeta – “the Trickster” – a man so promiscuous in his deceptions that the electorate simply can’t keep track of them. (“Thanks to the extent of Trampeta’s machinations,” we’re told, “many of the things he did were winked at, or a blind eye was turned to them.”)

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There is strong music in his name. When Bazán’s narrator declares that Trampeta “felt certain of impunity, even if he were to burn down half the town and beat up, sue or imprison the other half”, you wonder if this part of Galicia has a Fifth Avenue. You may also find yourself speculating about how to inhabit a culture like this, which seems not to know whether it is alive or dead.

Bazán was in in love with death. As time went on, her passion increased. She was one of those writers who greeted the fin de siècle by embracing the outré and the esoteric. Despite her devout Catholicism, she even defended the practice of Satanism. “To believe in the devil is to believe in God,” she wrote in 1911. On my day with the Decadence Research Unit, Leire Barrera-Medrano offered a way to interpret Bazán’s position. Her engagement with the occult, she suggested, “was a necessary spiritual expurgation”.

These, I suppose, are the seductions of decadence. To gaze upon the process of decay, feel a melancholy pleasure, and nurse the idea that at some point in the future, new life will flower.

“…Spain, with its vast, sunbaked and largely uninhabited interior (and geographical proximity to Western European markets) would be well-placed to benefit from a solar-driven manufacturing revolution.”

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I’m not the only one who sees a bright future for the nation. Bryan Caplan, who is Professor of Economics at George Mason University, has just returned from a five week stay in the country:

“The quickest way to explain Spain to an American: Spain is the California of Europe.  I grew up in Los Angeles, and often found myself looking around and thinking, “This could easily be California.”  The parallel is most obvious for geography – the deserts, the mountains, the coasts…”

It’s an intriguing comparison. In both land area and population, Spain is about a fifth bigger than California. The Golden State is much richer though. If it were an independent country, California would easily be one of the top ten global economies. Indeed, the latest estimates would put it in the top five. Spain, meanwhile, comes in 13th or 14th – with a GDP per head of $31,000 as opposed to California’s whopping $76,000. I dare say the likes of Mark Zuckerberg skew the Californian average somewhat, but that’s still quite a gap.

What could Spain do to start catching up? Caplan has nothing to say about energy resources, but he does think that Spain holds another trump card:

“Spain has more to gain from immigration than virtually any other country on Earth. There are almost 500 million native Spanish speakers on Earth – and only 47 million people in Spain… due to the low linguistic and cultural barriers, the migrants are ready to hit the ground running. You can already see migration-fueled growth all over Spain, but that’s only a small fraction of Spain’s potential.”

There’s certainly plenty of room for an expanded population – “you can see vast unused lands even ten miles from Madrid.” In fact, if you divide up the country into square kilometers, 87% of Spain is unpopulated.

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Caplan argues that Spain could unlock massive potential for growth by liberalising its immigration controls (though, of course, its borders are already open to migrants from other EU countries) – as well as by loosening up its labour market and its planning system:

“The trinity of ‘deregulate immigration, employment, and housing’ is vital in almost every country, but this formula would do more for Spain than nearly any other country.  Wise policy would make Spain the biggest economy in Europe in twenty years flat.”

Caplan does express some doubt as to whether the Spanish would ever take such a libertarian path. The renewed popularity of the Socialist Party would suggest not. However, the country’s membership of the European single currency may leave it with no choice.

When an economy is hit by a crisis, the conventional response is to cut interest rates and devalue the currency. But, for Spain, which swapped its Peseta for the Euro twenty years ago, those things are decided in Frankfurt not Madrid. So what could the country do, should it find itself in economic trouble? Assuming that a bailout from German taxpayers is not forthcoming, the one remaining option is internal devaluation. This refers to a combination of austerity, wage restraint and deregulation, all designed to restore confidence and competitiveness by cutting costs.

That’s what happened earlier this decade when the Eurozone crisis hit the countries of southern Europe. Spain made an impressive recovery – in many ways outshining the economies of northern Europe. However, as I’ve argued previously, a lot of this was achieved by squeezing workers, and there are limits to how much more they can take.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen surges of support for protest parties of the Left (Podemos), Right (Vox) and centre (Ciudadanos). At the moment, the volatile electorate has swung back to the Socialists – who look set to do well in the impending general election (the fourth in the space of five years). Should the next Government find itself strapped for cash, a deregulating dash-for-growth may be more palatable to voters than everlasting austerity and wage restraint.

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Indeed, if a renewed Eurozone crisis breaks out elsewhere and spreads its contagion across southern Europe, then such a strategy could be Spain’s only way out. It carries it own risks of populist backlash, but no other member state has a better chance of pulling it off. If anywhere in the Eurozone has the potential to become a high growth frontier economy, it is Europe’s California.

The most obvious objection to this theory is that while the Golden State is home to several of the world’s biggest tech companies, Spain isn’t. However, neither is the rest of Europe, which in this vital economic sector is hopelessly outclassed by America, China, Japan and South Korea.

So within the context of the Eurozone, this doesn’t leave Spain at a special disadvantage. Meanwhile, the country’s special advantages are there waiting to be fully unleashed – with the potential to disrupt the EU’s economic pecking order. The German masters of the Eurozone should think carefully before backing Spain into a corner again.

Tensions were running high last week. Insults shot back and forth during the final TV debates. “Are you done lying yet?” one of the politicians said impatiently, “Then it’s my turn now.” Cue much delight on Twitter.

One of the key causes of current disruption, though, was glaringly absent from the highly-staged, high-stakes debates. Vox, a radical Right-wing group founded a mere six years ago, was not eligible to participate because it didn’t have any elected representatives in Madrid. Not any longer. Vox has since claimed 24 seats in Spain’s parliament – the first far-right grouping to win any seats since the death of Franco, in 1975.

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For many in Spain, the growing appeal of these populists is alarming. It certainly is for the conservative Popular Party (PP), which was humiliated in the ballot as its number of seats more than halved from 137 in 2016’s vote to 66. It’s a threat too, to the other main party on the Right, Ciudadanos, which entered the Spanish parliament in 2015 with around 14% of the vote. Though it remained steady at 16% yesterday.

But those most alarmed are on the Left, particularly the centre-Left Socialist Party (the PSOE), whose leader, Pedro Sánchez, has been Prime Minister since last summer, and Podemos, the young party to the Left of the Socialists. For them, Vox represents social and political regression in its purest form and will doubtless give them a turbulent time as they try to form a coalition from a fragmented system.

Vox was founded in late 2013 by Santiago Abascal, a former official of the Popular Party and Vox’s current leader. He left the PP because he felt it was abandoning its conservative values and getting too soft on Catalan and Basque secessionism. He now refers to his former party as “the tiny, cowardly Right”.

It didn’t break through until December of last year at which point it won more than 10% of the vote in the regional elections in Andalusia — a region especially affected by unemployment, immigration, and economic stagnation – helping to oust the Left, which had governed since 1982. Its appeal has subsequently been spreading across the country, with Abascal’s rallies drawing large crowds.

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Socially extremely conservative, Vox has been carefully tapping in to voter anxieties which are fuelled by culture wars and an acute sense of loss: the loss of a former way of life, of national sovereignty, of their privilege as well as the loss of jobs. Immigration is partly blamed for this. With some 50,000 people crossing the Mediterranean in 2018, Spain has now replaced Italy as the main hub for migrants from Africa. But the Catalan and Basque attempts at secessionism are also seen as agents of unwanted change and a betrayal of Spain.

Vox offers an affirmation of traditional, unapologetic, masculine Spanishness. “The Left will never succeed in making us feel ashamed for that which only merits pride,” said Abascal at a rally last autumn. This is Spanish politics, cowboy-style: Vox’s campaign video shows its leader crossing a plane as a lone ranger on horseback.

Abascal proudly invokes Spain’s unity and Catholicism while calling for drastic measures against immigrants, particularly of a Muslim background. He defends family values and stands up for men against the oppression of “feminazis”. He champions hunters and bullfighting, opposes gay marriage (which has been legal since 2005), and wants to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape.

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While the Left accepts the fact that the Spanish state contains various nations, including Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country — a political reality enshrined in Spain’s constitution — Vox calls for a return to centralism. Along with Ciudadanos and the PP, Vox is radically opposed to Catalan claims to self-determination. In fact, it proposes to make pro-independence parties illegal.

It’s partly in reaction to the Catalan bid for independence that Vox has managed to revive patriotism so powerfully. In post-Franco Spain, flag-waving jingoism was long considered in bad taste outside of any context that did not involve the national football squad. But Vox has embraced a full-throated Spanish nationalism, promoting the flag waving and everything else it entails.

It celebrates myths and heroes that could have been lifted directly from Francoist textbooks: the conquest of the Americas, the Catholic “reconquest” of Spain in the 1492 after centuries of Muslim “domination” and El Cid. There are other echoes from more recent history, too. Several prominent Vox candidates have been shown to have an extreme-right past. The party’s number two for Barcelona, for example, is a former candidate for Fuerza Nueva, a violent neofascist group.

The Catalan crisis is definitely a factor in Vox’s rise in a country that was long considered immune to the anti-immigrant, right-wing populism that has emerged in many other countries. But more important is the feeling that the progressive urban political elites have neglected their needs and disparaged their traditions and culture. This disconnect is something we are seeing throughout Europe. And  is felt particularly strongly in rural populations. But the Vox message has also found purchase in wealthier, culturally conservative voters; this could be down to the fact that the party twins its conservative nationalist message with more liberal economic proposals (it seeks, for example, to reduce corporate tax rates, and abolish inheritance tax and estate tax altogether).

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Vox’s successful rise, and its leaching of voters from the other two parties on the right, unleashed a savage competition between Ciudadanos and the PP – pushing both to the Right. It was a battle, though, that the PP lost.

It falls, then, to the Socialists and Mr Sánchez – who won, but without a majority – to attempt to form a centre-Left coalition with Podemos, possibly with the support of the Catalan and Basque parties. This option, though, isn’t particularly favoured by the financial sector, which is nervous about Podemos’s proposals, which include raising the minimum wage, investing in health care and education, instituting a financial transaction tax, and cracking down on corporate tax evasion. And the separatists are seen as toxic by the centre Right, which will make it difficult for Sánchez to appeal to them for support.

Spain needs a stable government to tackle its many challenges: the economy has been growing at a bit over 2% but unemployment rates in some regions remains over 20%. The educational, judicial, and pension systems need overhauling, and it is desperate for a negotiated solution to the constitutional conundrum of its territorial make-up, which has paralysed the country for several years now.

It’s unlikely any coalition will bring stability; Spain isn’t used to them. And to make things worse, the entire country is going back to the polls on May 26 for regional, municipal, and European elections. This will make it harder for parties to commit to the concessions that coalitions require. Expect further division and disruption, now that the people have spoken.

Reports suggest it will be a prequel – the action taking place long before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But luckily Tolkien’s wizards and elves are more or less immortal, meaning that some familiar characters may be appearing as their younger selves. I wouldn’t be surprised if another ‘character’ makes an appearance too: the One Ring.

Arguably the most famous piece of jewellery in all of fiction, the Ring is not only a brilliant plot device, capable of linking events that take place centuries apart; it is also the focus of one of Tolkien’s most important themes: power.

Unlike his friend C.S. Lewis, Tolkien was not fond of allegorical fiction. He had no time for the idea that the Ring – extremely dangerous but hard to get rid of – was an allegory of the atomic bomb. Rather, it was exactly what he said it was: an embodiment of power and the corrupting effects of power.

Tolkien shows us that the only people who can be trusted with great power are those who don’t really want it – or who do, but have the moral strength to reject it. Even then, it’s touch-and-go, the burden of responsibility taking a terrible toll on the reluctant bearer.

Numerous commentaries have been written on this aspect of the story – often summed up by the Lord Acton quote: “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Which is true enough. But Tolkien was onto a whole lot more than that…

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Let’s begin at the beginning. The Ring was made at great cost to Sauron, its creator. He poured much of his own strength into an external object – one from which he could be separated, which in due course he was. So why take the risk? Sauron, though evil, was possessed of great cunning – why did he expose himself to such a vulnerability? Did old JRR just not think it through? Does the Ring actually represent a massive hole in the plot?

Not a bit of it. When you understand what Tolkien understood about the nature of power, it all makes perfect sense.

In a letter, he once wrote that the Ring was a “mythological way of presenting the truth that potency… if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalised and so as it were passed, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control.” This is a crucial insight into the way Tolkien understood power to work.

Power in politics is like power in physics: always on the move, a flow not an object. That’s why holding on to power is so difficult – literally so, in the case of electricity. We can generate, transmit and consume vast quantities of the stuff. However, unlike other resources – such as water or grain or coal – it’s very difficult to store in any great quantity.

If only it weren’t. For one thing we’d be able to save up electricity generated in the summer months, when demand is low, for use in the winter. Unfortunately electrons are energy not matter. We can’t stack them up like logs in a woodpile. The closest we can get are rechargeable batteries – but those are limited by the cost of capacity. The best hope for affordable long-term storage lies in using surplus power to make a fuel, like hydrogen, which can then be used to generate electricity at a future date – in other words, the best way to hold onto electrical power is to convert energy into matter and back again.

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Which brings us to back to the One Ring. It can be seen as power in material form – power you can hold onto, ready to be used as and when required. To a power-mad being like Sauron – unwilling to rule within limits – forging the Ring was a smart move.

Here’s another analogy: think of the difference between cashflow and capital. If all you have is cashflow – money which you spend as soon as you earn it – then any interruption leaves you helpless. It doesn’t matter how rich you were up until that point.

However, if you save a portion of your income, then you accumulate capital. And that gives you options – not only a reserve to fall back on, but also a means of boosting one’s own economic power and of acquiring control over that of others.

So that was what the One Ring was to Sauron: an investment of his magical power. You might still think he was foolish to put it all into a single object, small enough to lose down the back of a sofa; but his investment was protected. For a start, the Ring was virtually indestructible. Furthermore, it was so imbued with the identity of its creator that it had a kind of homing instinct, should it get lost. And then there was the effect it had on anyone coming into contact with it.

When energy becomes matter, it acquires mass. Enough mass in one place has a warping effect on time and space, which generates gravity, pulling other things towards it. There’s a parallel process in finance. Great accumulations of capital can distort entire economies. Certainly, they exert a gravitational pull: money comes to money and the rich get richer.

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In parallel fashion, the Ring –  as a great accumulation of power – enabled Sauron to bend the will of others to his own. In seeking to exalt themselves, they became his slaves.

*

Of course, we’re talking about magical power here – in a fictional, fantasy world. But Tolkien’s story is highly relevant to the real world, where power is political.

Most of the time political power is merely exercised. Successful politicians get the chance to direct the flow of power – but only for a while. They are either in power or out of it – and when you’re out, there really is nothing left of what you had. As is sometimes said in Westminster, “there’s nothing more ex than an ex-MP”.

Sometimes, however, power is invested – poured into some external but enduring form. I don’t mean an Ozymandian statue left broken and lifeless in the desert, but something still thrumming with influence – perhaps even long after the death of its creator.

The Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975. His authoritarian regime did not long outlive him and democracy was soon restored. In 1940, however, Franco ordered that work begin on a vast project – the Valley of the Fallen, which was a memorial to the dead of the Spanish Civil War and supposedly an “act of national atonement”. It took two decades to complete, with some of the work done by prisoners. The site consists of a complex of buildings – including a Benedictine abbey, a basilica and a 500 foot high stone cross.

To its many critics, the bleak grandiosity of the complex suggests an apparently Christian monument possessed by the spirit of Fascism. And though meant to honour the dead of the Civil War, it also contains the tomb of someone who did not die in the conflict: Franco himself.

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The Valley of the Fallen is still a focal point of intense controversy. Spanish governments have gone to great lengths to stop the site being used as a rallying point for Francoist sympathisers – and debate rages as to how the monument can be re-invented.

However, there’s no question of pulling it down like those statues of Lenin after the fall of the Soviet Union. The physical challenge alone would be enormous – the basilica is literally built into a mountain. It is also consecrated ground – a place of worship and the final resting place of 40,000 of the fallen, including some from the Republican side. Whether or not Franco’s remains are moved elsewhere (as the current Spanish government wishes to do), the monument is embedded in the substance and memory of the nation.

*

An investment of power doesn’t always have to take an architectural form. It can be something more diffuse than that. In the back story to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien tells us that, in addition to the One Ring, 19 subsidiary ‘Rings of Power’ were created and distributed among the movers-and-shakers of Middle Earth. The recipients thought they were getting a free gift; in reality they were plugging themselves into a network under the ultimate control of the One Ring, which Sauron retained for himself.

Now can you think of anything like that in our own world? A networked service whose benefits are given away for nothing and yet which amply repays the ‘generosity’ of those who control it? Doesn’t that sound like certain big tech companies one could mention? I’m not saying that Mark Zuckerberg is Sauron, just that the business model of Mordor isn’t entirely unknown in Silicon Valley.

Though we’re not forced by law to use social media, the technology is so enmeshed in the way we live that it’s getting harder to do without it. And that’s without taking into account its addictive qualities. Even when we don’t actually need it, we wants it. Yesss, we do, my precious. Now, where did I put my phone?

*

Another way of solidifying power is through constitutions and treaties. Unlike ordinary laws that can be passed and repealed by whoever happens to be in power at the time, constitutions and treaties are intended to have a binding effect – perhaps lasting for generations. Such arrangements can provide a foundation for fundamental rights or a predictable set of rules for international trade; but beyond a certain point they begin to crowd out the normal democratic process – and the need of governments to seek and renew a mandate from the governed.

Of course, constitutions can be amended and treaties abrogated. But when they’re allowed to proliferate and entangle themselves around the life of a nation, breaking free of their binding power can only come at great cost. It is what the Greeks found out in the Eurozone crisis and what the British are finding out as we struggle through Brexit.

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The EU and its project of ever-closer union is nothing if not an attempt to accumulate power, acquired from sovereign states and deposited layer by layer. It represents decades of political investment, initiatives taken and compromises made – often with the best of intentions.

One has to understand how those who have invested so much for so long feel about the idea of throwing it all away. However, so much power solidified in one place exerts a force that disrupts everything around it – and so one must also understand the motivations of those who wish to resist.

The stars of the EU flag represent the coming together of nations. But one can’t help but notice the shape that they form.

Its membership, though, is controversial. To make room for countries from different parts of the world, countries in well-represented regions have been excluded. The most glaring example is Spain. By any reasonable measure, the Spanish economy easily makes the global top twenty. But because western Europe is rich in medium-sized powers – with four in the G20 – it was thought that adding a fifth to the list (at the expense of, say, Argentina or South Africa) would result in a regional imbalance. And so Spain is fobbed off with “permanent guest invitee” status.

That’s the Spanish story more generally: it’s a country that doesn’t get the global attention it deserves. Never mind the size of its economy, just look at the influence its culture and language has in shaping the modern world. But even when the media’s attention is on Europe alone, it’s as if the continent stops at the Pyrenees.

Of course, if the news is about the fraught relationship between the richer northern and poorer southern members of the Eurozone, Spain (and Portugal) may get a mention, but the focus tends to be on the latest Italian drama or Greek tragedy.

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But perhaps that goes to show that ‘no news is good news’ – because as Clara Wright reminds us in an AFP report (via the The Local), there is some good news about the Spanish economy:

“Spain’s economy shrank during the financial crisis from 2009 to 2013 but rebounded in 2014. Its rate of expansion has since outstripped much of the EU with growth of more than 3 percent.”

Furthermore, “Spain’s jobless rate is down from a peak of nearly 27 percent in 2013 to 14.5 percent in September”.

The Spanish recovery is an under-reported story; and perhaps that’s because it doesn’t fit the standard narratives. It contradicts the idea of southern Europe as an economic disaster zone in need of firm guidance from Frankfurt.

It also appears to contradict the Eurosceptic narrative. If membership of a single currency is such a straitjacket (one tied to the primary benefit of the Germans) then how have the Spanish pulled off such a notable turnaround? Indeed, how have they managed to show those self-righteous northern Europeans a thing or too about growth?

Unfortunately, this is where good news gives way to bad:

“The country has the European Union’s highest proportion of workers at risk of poverty, 13.1 percent, after Greece and Romania, according to 2016 Eurostat figures…

“…salaries did not recover when the economy returned to growth because unemployment has remained high…

“Real wages actually declined in the last two years, the OECD said in a report published in July.”

Poverty pay isn’t the only way in which Spanish workers are disadvantaged:

“Spain is more reliant on temporary contracts than any other EU nation. More than one in four workers, 26.9 percent, was employed on a temporary contract in the second quarter, according to Eurostat.”

There’s a name for this kind of thing: internal devaluation.

When a country suffers a severe economic shock as Spain did during the Eurozone crisis – and it can’t devalue its currency in response because it no longer controls that currency – then it has to find other ways of staying afloat. One of the easiest, but unfairest, approaches is to squeeze workers. At a time of high unemployment and cuts to social security, people can’t afford to turn down work – no matter how poor the wages or insecure the contract.

Of course, it’s not as if the external devaluation resulting from exchange rate adjustment is cost free. When the value of a country’s currency sinks, its exports get cheaper and imports more expensive,  driving up prices at home. However, while everyone experiences the pain of inflation, an attack on wages and work security falls heaviest on the least protected workers – such as the young and low-skilled.

It should also be said that upward pressure on prices tends to help people in debt by inflating away the real value of the sums they owe. Putting pressure on wages, on the other hand, only reduces people’s ability to repay their debts.

For all these reasons, Spain’s economic success story is not quite what it seems.

The shine has also come off the political success story. For many years Spain was unique among the big EU countries in having no significant party of the radical Right.

Suggested reading

What snapped in Spain?

By James Bloodworth

Though politics-as-usual was disrupted, but by new parties on the Left (Podemos) and in the centre (Ciudadanos), not to mention the separatist movement in Catalonia.

However, in the last year or so, the national populist party Vox has emerged from nowhere to become a major force in Spanish politics. It’s set to win dozens of seats in the forthcoming general election. Last year, it also pulled off a major upset by helping dislodge the ruling socialists in their Andalusian heartland.

The rise of Vox has been explained as a nationalist reaction against Catalan separatism. However, political discontent and volatility are also the result of economic factors.

It is one thing to have ordinary working people suffer through a recession, but if they’re still suffering through a supposed recovery, that’s when the establishment should really watch out.

Will Spain’s working poor take revenge?

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1. Germany

Germany’s state elections will be a test of the strength of blue-collar populists on the one hand, and the centrist anti-populist reaction on the other. State elections held last year showed that the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) has support even in parts of Western Germany. AfD entered the regional parliaments in Bavaria and Hesse, taking votes from both the centre-Right CDU/CSU and the centre-left SPD. But other voters abandoned the mainstream parties for the opposite reason – they thought the grand coalition too restrictive of migration, with the Greens being the greatest beneficiary.

Bremen’s election this year, scheduled on May 26, the day of the EU elections, will test the SPD’s resilience – the party has received the most votes there in every state election since 1946. No polls have been taken since the recent Green spurt, but in August the SPD were level with the CSU and only 6% ahead of the Greens. If the national poll trends since then – which show the SPD falling and the Greens rising – are occurring in Bremen too, the SPD is currently running behind the CDU in Bremen and running neck and neck with the Greens.

Suggested reading

Germany's identity crisis

By Henry Olsen

Such a result would be a disaster for the SPD and would likely pile the pressure on them to abandon their grand coalition with Chancellor Merkel’s CDU/CSU. Should that occur, it is unlikely that Merkel or CDU party president, and presumed heir apparent, Annegret Kramp-Krannenbauer, could form a government since the only alternative to a grand coalition is a CDU/CSU-Green-FDP coalition. A governmental collapse would then send Germans to the polls in a snap federal election.

The other state elections occur in three former East German states, and the key question there is whether the AfD will take first place in any – or even all – contests. The most recent polls in Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia all show the AfD in second place, but only a few points behind the front runner. Moreover, each state’s poll shows the combined vote share for the AfD and the descendants of the former East German Communist party, Die Linke (“The Left”), at between 39% and 44%.

That would make for extremely fraught coalition talks, as the only possible outcome that excludes both parties involves four party administrations involving the CDU, SPD, the liberal FDP and the Greens. In Thuringia and Saxony, polls indicate that the only alternative to such a rainbow coalition would require the CDU to partner with the AfD or Die Linke, neither of which the party has ever been willing to do.

2. Spain

In conjunction with the EU vote on May 26^th, 13 of Spain’s regions will go to the polls. All three types of populists have parties contesting these elections, and two of them look to be rising. The Right-wing populist party, Vox, is poised to enter most regions’ parliaments. The centrist populist Ciudadanos are also poised for significant gains, giving them near equal status with Spain’s two traditional parties in many regions. But the Leftist populist Podemos, or Unidos Podemos in some regions where they have combined with the former United Left, are likely to slip in most states.

All three trends are apparent in the Madrid region. Vox’s staunch opposition to Catalonian separatism and migration has seen it skyrocket in the polls, where it currently receives 12-18%. Much of this support, seemingly, comes from the traditional party of the centre-Right, Partido Popular (PP). But support also seems to be coming from former Podemos voters too. Podemos and the United Left had received over 23% in 2015, but the new grouping Unidos Podemos was polling at only 18% in early January. Just as is the case with support for similar parties around the world, like the Sweden Democrats and Germany’s AfD, Vox’s support thus seems to come from both the Left and Right.

Suggested reading

Could Spain's Pedro Sánchez save Europe's centre-Left?

By James Bloodworth

Spain’s government is likely to become even less stable over the coming years. The current parliament is roughly split between a Left-populist bloc and a Right-centre bloc, with Vox currently unrepresented. The balance of power is held by a grab bag of regional parties and Catalonian separatists. If the government were to fall this year, unable to paper over the differences between these groups, Vox seem likely to gain enough seats to hold the balance of power.

This would present Spain with the same dilemma as other Europeans countries: either they create a grand coalition that weakens over time or they invite the populists into government in a centre-Right led coalition. Either course is likely to increase political instability in the EU’s fourth largest economy.

3. Estonia

Estonia’s election on March 1 is likely to see a new, Eurosceptic and ethno-nationalist party hold the balance of power. The Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) has recently been polling around 20%, making it the third largest party in the country. With the market-liberal Reform Party and the centre-Left, Centre Party running roughly even, the EKRE could decide which party takes the Prime Minister’s chair.

EKRE emphasises Estonian nationality above all else – arguing that Estonia has become a “vassal state” of the EU. It strongly opposes immigration and Russian involvement in the Ukraine and Georgia, and challenges the market forces it says have made Estonia a home of cheap labour for foreign capital. Inclusion of the EKRE in government would undoubtedly sound alarm bells among the European establishment, but their participation may be unavoidable if there is to be stable government.

4. Denmark

The Danish election, which must be held on or before 17 June, seems likely to further demonstrate populism’s impact. The Danish People’s Party (DF) is one of Europe’s more successful blue-collar populist parties and has been a mainstay of the current centre-Right governing coalition. Even the Social Democrats have backed some of the government’s anti-immigration proposals (at the expense of their link with longtime partners the Social Liberals). While the Social Democrats look set to finish in first place, Denmark’s fragmented party system requires at least three parties to coalesce to form a government. The Social Democrats’ shift on migration issues opens up the possibility of a European first: a centre-left-led government that includes a blue-collar populist party.

Suggested reading

Is blue-collar populism here to stay?

By Henry Olsen

DF has been so successful that it has now spawned a competitor, the New Right (Nye Boergerlige in Danish). Formed by former members of the Conservative People’s Party, the New Right argues that DF is too supportive of migrants. It is also well to DF’s right on economic matters, with its leader supporting the total elimination of corporate taxation. Polls show it is consistently above the 2% threshold for parliamentary representation.

5. Canada

Canada’s general election, scheduled for October 19^th, will be another test of populism’s appeal. Despite having one of the largest shares of immigrants in the Western world, Canada – thanks in part to a skills-based immigration policy – has largely avoided anti-migrant populism. But that will be put to the test by former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier’s new People’s Party of Canada.

Bernier left the Conservatives after narrowly losing his bid to become their leader. His new party will campaign on pro-market economics and lower levels of overall immigration. It is currently polling below 2% in the polls, and, like the UK, Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system prevents small parties from winning many, if any, seats. Its influence could nevertheless force the Conservatives to the Right in order to increase their chance of beating Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Even raising the issue threatens to break Canada’s pro-immigration consensus.

Bernier’s home province of Quebec is particularly interesting. Quebec is the only province allowed to admit its own economic immigrants, and the province’s desire to maintain its predominantly Francophone status has meant it is increasingly admitting migrants from North Africa. Quebec is also where anti-Muslim feelings are strongest, and a centre-Right party pledging to reduce immigration by 20% won a majority of seats in last year’s provincial election.

Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer recently said he wants to work with the Quebec government to give it more authority over non-economic migration in the province, a position widely believed to be crafted to court the Quebec centre-Right vote.

Much can happen in a year, but it’s hard to see the elites’ dream of a return to normalcy becoming a reality. Too many voters are dreaming of something quite different to the status quo, and the populist parties look most likely to deliver it for them.

Suggested reading

Europe's biggest test yet

By Matthew Goodwin

Bucking that trend is Spain, where in June a young Left-leaning leader took over as Prime Minsiter. Pedro Sánchez, the leader of Spain’s centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE), ruthlessly deposed Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) minority government in a vote of no confidence. The motion won the backing of 180 MPs – including those of the radical left-wing party Podemos, and the largest Catalan pro-independence parties – and came after Spain’s highest criminal court found that the PP had profited from illegal kickbacks from government contracts.

Further reading

How the Left failed flyover Spain

By James Bloodworth

Like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain (though more soft than hard Left), Sánchez has been consistently underestimated by his country’s political elite. First elected as PSOE leader in 2014 on a promise to take the party “as far to the left as its grassroots voters”, Sánchez resigned the leadership in 2016 after a party mutiny over his refusal to facilitate the re-election of Rajoy as prime minister following an inconclusive election. At the time Sánchez was derided as a “fool without scruples” by Spanish newspaper EL PAÍS.

Down but not out, Sánchez subsequently toured the country in his beaten-up Peugeot, meeting with grassroots PSOE members and drumming up support. Like Corbyn – and in contrast to figures from the political centre – Sánchez draws his support predominantly from the grassroots. As a result of reaching out to Socialist Party activists he was easily re-elected as party leader in June 2017. A year later he became the first politician in Spain’s history to unseat a prime minister through a no-confidence motion.

Sánchez’s ousting of Mariano Rajoy was a calculated manoeuvre that shocked the Spanish political establishment. Yet it was hardly representative of a sea change in the public mood in Spain. Indeed, at the time of Rajoy’s deposal it was Albert Rivera’s centre-Right Ciudadanos that was riding high in the polls, ahead of rivals PP and PSOE – largely a result of Ciudadanos’s hard-line stance over Catalan independence.

Further reading

Can social democracy survive?

By Matthew Goodwin

Sánchez’s ruthlessness in deposing the stale and corrupt Rajoy government changed that. A poll taken shortly after Rajoy’s departure had the PSOE on 28.8% of the vote, ahead of the PP on 25.6% and Ciudadanos on 21.1%. Support for the PSOE’s Left-wing rivals Podemos also fell, slipping to 13.1% – less than half of what the insurgent party were polling three years earlier.

In other words, on the surface at least Sánchez has bucked the continent-wide trend of social democracy in precipitous decline. It seems strange, then, that the European centre-Left is not making more noise about events in Spain. But then coming from the Left-wing of the PSOE, Sánchez invariably prompts suspicion among the continent’s social democratic establishment, who see France’s Emmanuel Macron as a politician more worthy of emulation than Jeremy Corbyn.

Moreover, while Sánchez may be in office, he has little power to implement his policies: the PSOE holds just 84 seats in the 350-seat Congress of Deputies, Spain’s lower house, while its upper house, the Senate, is still controlled by the PP.

Sánchez is therefore under huge pressure to call an election. He had initially promised to do so – a move calculated to win support from other parties during the no confidence vote against Rajoy. Yet since becoming Prime Minister he has done a swift about-turn, announcing recently that he would stay on until his mandate expires in 2020 so as to “normalise” the country.

Further reading

The political centre is not where liberals think it is

By Peter Franklin

The Sánchez government has, to be clear, made several striking announcements since coming to office in June. In July the Prime Minister proposed that the remains of Spain’s former dictator General Franco would be exhumed. Nearly half a century after the end of the dictatorship the Franco era remains a controversial topic.

Spain has also adopted a more open stance toward refugees, accepting the stranded migrants on board the Aquarius rescue ship after Italy and Malta refused to let the ship dock. In stark contrast to populist governments elsewhere in Europe, Sanchez said it was Spain’s “obligation to help avoid a humanitarian catastrophe and offer a safe port to these people”.

Yet the prospects of the Sánchez government sticking to a Left-wing agenda in the face of strong opposition are not overly promising. Indeed, reneging on his pledge to call an election is not the only U-turn Sánchez has made since coming to power. Most notably he dropped his party’s opposition to an arms deal with Saudi Arabia. It is thought the cancellation of the deal would have jeopardised a larger agreement with the Saudis to build five corvette warships worth $2.1 billion in Spain’s Navantia shipyard.

Further reading

The West divided: Populism versus liberalism in the 21st century

By Peter Franklin

The biggest sticking point for the new government, however, will be in delivering a budget that moves Spain firmly away from austerity. This week Sánchez agreed a deal with Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos. The deal proposes a raft of Left-wing measures for next year’s budget, including a 22% increase in the minimum wage, heavy investment in education, longer paternity leave and higher spening on benefit payments. The deal seeks to avoid an early general election, which benefits both men: if one were held, Podemos would likely do poorly and there is no guarantee the PSOE would win a majority.

Additionally, the agreement between the two parties may precipitate a more promising formal alliance during next year’s regional and local elections. Iglesias himself told EL PAÍS last week that the agreement marked the “starting point for a new period in Spanish economic policy, which we think will result in a coalition government”.

But while Sánchez’s proposed budget would represent a sea change in Spanish economic policy, which has been characterised by austerity since the financial crash of 2008, it will require tough negotiations with Brussels, which has already raised concerns about wage increases in a country with 15% unemployment.

Further reading

The economic rationalists don't get the immigration debate

By Ben Cobley

It will also be a challenge to get the Budget through parliament when they vote in November: even with the support of Podemos, Sánchez remains more than 50 MPs short of an overall majority. The PP and Ciudadanos – both of whom will vote against the plan ­– hold 166 seats, meaning Sánchez may try to win the backing of separatists by making concessions on regional autonomy.

The most probable outcome during budget negotiations is the PSOE accepting the budget deficit targets set out by the PP before it was ousted from office. The PP would thus be unable to block the plans. However that budget would mean a raft of tax increases to fund Sánchez’s ambitious spending commitments. Sánchez would then have the additional headache of needing to win the support of Podemos for any additional increase in taxes.

This helps explain why Spain is not being held up as an example of European social democratic resurgence. If support for Sánchez begins to dip on the back of tax increases and an unwillingness to call an election, the coup against Rajoy may represent no more than a pyrrhic victory for Spain’s Socialists. Spain’s government is not the consolation that Europe’s centre-Left are desperately searching for. At least not yet it isn’t.

But this only provides so much distraction from a more troubling story: that of the economy. Improved overall growth figures cannot conceal the ongoing rise in precarious and poorly paid work which increasingly characterises the Spanish economy.

Rents in Spain have been rising 12 times faster than salaries; the typical salary of young workers entering the labour market is 33% lower today than it was in 2008; and about 90% of new employment contracts signed in 2015 were for temporary positions. Unemployment peaked at 27% in 2013 and has since fallen, but it remains twice that of the Eurozone average. And the country also holds the unenviable distinction of having the third highest rate of child poverty in the EU (after Romania and Greece).

Suggested reading

Has populism failed in Italy?

By Michael Burleigh

But these broad-brush statistics don’t tell the full story. Others have done pretty well out of Spain’s descent into recession a decade ago: the wealthiest 1% saw its share of national wealth increase from 17% in 2011 to 20% in 2014, according to the Bank of Spain. Indeed, it is the poorest 25% who have suffered the biggest loss of wealth since 2011, with the bottom quarter in debt by an average of €1,300.

It’s a disparity that can be seen starkly in the contrast between the undeveloped south, areas such as Andalusia and Murcia, and cities such as Madrid and Barcelona. The average salary in the Madrid suburb of Pozuelo de Alarcón is €73,000, while in Torrevieja, a province of Alicante, it is just €13,000. A summer holiday resort that attracts its fair share of British pensioners in search of sea, sun and sangria, Torrevieja experiences challenges similar to towns like Blackpool, with many of the local jobs vanishing during the winter months. The nearby city of Elda, another tourist destination, was listed as having the highest number of residents out of work in the whole of Spain in 2015, with an astonishing 40% of residents without a job.

The south east, you could call it flyover Spain, was particularly badly hit by the decline of construction. And white elephants – all those abandoned building projects – dot the landscape after toxic debt burst the building bubble and brought down the country’s banks.[1. The most notorious example is the empty Cuidad Real airport, which sits 235km south of Madrid. Built in 2008, the airport went bankrupt in 2012, and sits abandoned to nature and the elements. It is a ghostly testament to the irresponsible and over-priced projects which helped to cripple Spain’s construction sector.]

Suggested reading

Poles apart: what’s driving Poland’s populism?

By Ben Sixsmith

Nor is it only rural areas that are still suffering. Despite being nominally Spain’s third city, Valencia is very much treated as flyover country by Spanish elites. New home stock in the city has fallen by 35% since 2009. With the disappearance of new building projects, large numbers of jobs – and with them incomes – have disappeared too. In 2014 it was estimated that a quarter of all Valencia’s inhabitants were living in poverty. And once you are on the way to the bottom it often takes very little to sink a few more rungs. A street count carried out in Valencia in 2016 by the homelessness charity Bokatas found that over 400 people were sleeping rough in the city – far more than the official estimate of 79 people made the previous year.

The rise of outsider parties in Spain was undoubtedly rooted in the inability of mainstream parties to deal effectively with this fallout, generated by the financial crash, and the growing inequality in the country. But equally, the Left has spectacularly failed to take the lead on dealing with the corruption scandal currently engulfing the Rajoy government – El País has called it “the largest corruption scandal in Spain’s democratic history” – nevermind the wider economic malaise.

As a result, Pedro Sanchez’s opposition Socialist Party (PSOE) continues to underperform in the polls – though Sanchez may yet win power through a vote of no confidence to oust Rajoy. And much of the ruling Popular Party’s (PP) disillusioned support is peeling off to the new centre-right party Ciudadanos. Indeed, a Metroscopia poll taken earlier this year found that Ciudadanos, led by the 38-year-old lawyer Albert Rivera, would receive the most votes were an election to be held today, with the party on course to secure 27% of the vote. This would be a hugely significant result for a party that was only founded in 2005.

Ciudadanos has benefited significantly from its staunch opposition to Catalonian independence and its tough talk on corruption. In Catalonia, where the party first emerged, it has taken a harder stance on immigration, and proposed burqa and niqab bans in public spaces. But it is also attracting middle class voters with a Macron-esque promise of cosmetic rather than radical change.

Perhaps emphasising the extent to which populism in Spain is increasingly dominated by the centre-right is the plight of Podemos. The insurgent left-wing party finished third with 20% of the vote at the 2015 election. It has since slipped back into fourth place and can now rely on the support of around 17% of the electorate. As I predicted for UnHerd last year, the party’s decision in 2016 to forge an electoral pact with the old Spanish Communist Party (PCE) has put a ceiling on the number of voters it could attract from the centre.

What is more, Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has been accused of hypocrisy after it was revealed that he and his partner, the party’s parliamentary spokeswoman Irene Montero, purchased an exclusive property worth over half a million Euros situated on the outskirts of Madrid. So much for Iglesias’ – and by extension Podemos’ – wider reputation as modest, self-abnegating idealists, especially at a time when so many in Spain are struggling.

The struggle of Spain’s hard-up classes will sound familiar to many voters across Europe. But so too the inability of the Spanish Left to capitalise on the discrediting of elites – and more broadly to figure out what its purpose is in the twenty-first century.

More on populism in Spain...

Mainland Europe's most important radical party doesn't just seek seats - but 'hegemonia' too

By James Bloodworth

Leaving aside very small countries such as Monaco and Luxembourg, what is the most densely populated nation in Europe?

The conventional answer is the Netherlands with 505 people per square kilometre, followed by England on 426.

And yet according to Alasdair Rae, the true answer is Spain. Rae may be a professor of urban studies and planning at Sheffield University, but how can he possibly be right? Spain’s population is smaller than England’s, while it’s geographical area is almost four times bigger. That surely settles the matter.

Or does it? Rae’s insight is that the Spanish population isn’t spread out over Spain, but rather a small part of it. This is how he puts his case in a thought provoking piece for the Conversation:

“A good way to understand this measure is to look at Spain. It has a population density of 93 people per km², giving the impression of a sparsely populated country. This is borne out in the map, where much of Spain appears to be empty; much more so than any other large European country.

“…Yet characterising Spain as a sparsely populated country does not reflect the experience on the ground – as anyone who knows Barcelona or Madrid can tell you.

“Spain contains within it more than 505,000 1km squares. But only 13% of them are lived in.”

By recalculating population density in each country using only the land area where people actually live he produces a measure of what he calls “lived density”.

By this yardstick, Spain’s population density leaps from 93 people per square kilometre to 737 – way above the equivalent for England and the Netherlands. From a human point of view, Spain is a densely populated country that happens to have a lot of empty countryside attached to it. Another good example is Iceland – which has a conventional population density of just 3 people per square kilometre, but a more convivial 187 when it comes to lived density.

All of this is an object lesson in the way the statistics can be demonstrably ‘true’ and yet completely misleading as to how people actually experience their lives. The political consequences of this phenomenon are explored in ‘Blindsided’ – a special series for UnHerd from our Flyover Country editor Henry Olsen.

Recommended reading

The elites missed populism's rise (but shouldn't have done)

By Henry Olsen

There’s a further point worth unpacking from Professor Rae’s detailed analysis of population density.

It’s often argued that because just 11% of England is built on, there’s plenty of room to build new houses while leaving most of the English countryside untouched. This is true (even if it does ignore the fact that the urbanising impact of development extents beyond its immediate ‘footprint’). However, it distracts from the fact that we could, if we were willing to do the redevelopment, pack a lot more living space within our cities – especially the global ones – which, crucially, is where the highest demand is:

“Spain has the most densely populated km² in Europe; more than 53,000 people inhabit a single 1km² area in Barcelona. France also has an area with more than 50,000 people in a single km², in Paris.

“There are 33 1km² areas across Europe with a population of 40,000 or more: 23 are in Spain, and ten are in France. England’s most densely populated km², in West London, has just over 20,000 people in it. “

As I’ve argued before, cities like London could densify – and furthermore do it sympathetically, even beautifully.

Traditional architecture and street patterns are not only compatible with density, they’re a time-tested way of sustaining it over decades and centuries.

If we want to push up ‘lived density’ then we must make density liveable.

The answer is six – Norway (1905), Finland (1917), Ireland (1922), Iceland (1944), Austria (1955) and Malta (1964). Scotland might have become the seventh, but its people decided against independence in 2014.

Now Catalonia demands the same right of self-determination. The question is whether it is entitled to it. Last weekend, the Spanish authorities delivered their answer via the medium of violence. But what should those of us who prefer reasoned argument think?

Writing for Project Syndicate, Richard N Haass argues that the best approach is conditional not absolute:

“…there is not and should not be any automatic right of self-determination. It was one thing for people in colonies ruled by governments thousands of miles away and deprived of many of their rights to opt for independence in the wake of World War II. It is something else altogether for a region to secede from an existing independent country. A world of frequent secession would be in even greater disarray than the world we already have.”

Rather, the right to self-determination should depend on meeting certain criteria:

“There is no universally accepted set of standards, but let me suggest some that should be applied:

• A history that indicates a clear collective identity for the people in question.
• A compelling rationale, in the sense that the population must be able to demonstrate that the status quo is imposing a large political, physical, and economic price.
• The population makes clear that it strongly favors a new and separate political status.
• The new state is viable (the last thing the world needs are more failed states).
• Secession does not jeopardize the viability of the rump state or the security of neighboring states.”

In his article, Haass applies this framework to the Kurdish question, but it is just as applicable to the case of Catalonia. So do the Catalans meet the five tests?

On the first test, the answer is a clear ‘yes’. Linguistically, Catalan is as distinct from (Castilian) Spanish as Norwegian is from Swedish. Catalonia’s history may be bound up with that of Spain, but the same could be said of Britain and Ireland or England and Scotland. Cultural distinctiveness can survive centuries of political entanglement.

The second test can only really be answered by the Catalan people themselves, but the pro-independence case focuses on the opportunity cost of having your laws and finances controlled by others when you’re demonstrably capable of controlling them yourself. Norway, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, Austria and Malta, have all prospered as independent states. And even when they’ve been governed unwisely, they’ve at least had the dignity of making their own mistakes.

As for the crucial third test, that of popular support for independence, Catalans regularly vote for pro-independence parties, they have a pro-independence regional government and have rallied for independence in their millions. Does that mean that a majority favour independence? Well, there’s only one way to find out…

The fourth test – of viability – is easily answered. The Catalan economy is substantial, bigger than that of Portugal, for instance; and bigger than that of every single eastern European country apart from Russia and Poland. In terms of per capita wealth, it is richer than the rest of Spain and is centred on one of the great European cities – Barcelona. The only thing that could compromise that Catalonia’s viability is a concerted campaign of trade blackmail by its neighbours.

That brings us to the fifth and final test – would Catalan independence destabilise its neighbours? The answer is not unless they chose to destabilise themselves. The rest of Spain is several times the size of Catalonia, it would remain a great nation without it.

It may be that in a properly organised, above-board referendum (you know, one without armed police ripping ballot boxes out of the hands of screaming civilians), the people of Catalonia would decide that they had more to gain from staying in than getting out – as did the Scots.

To allow a people to make that decision calmly and respectfully is not a sign of weakness, but of strength.