The Spanish right to examination: denial, complex and modernity

• The right side of the story. From Nietzsche to Obama

Do we have a right in Spain? An observer of our democracy could perhaps answer the question with a resolved no. Especially judging by the traditional concern, that of the leaders of the parties with a majority vocation of the Spanish right, to avoid identifying the ideology of their parties with the category of "right."

If we look at the historical time of post-Francoism, the two main successful projects of the right, the Union of the Democratic Center of Adolfo Suárez and the Popular Party of José María Aznar, avoided identifying themselves exclusively with the idea of ​​"right." In both cases, the "center" made of wild card was present, both to operate as a unique ideological reference in the case of the UCD, and to reduce the content of the idea of ​​"right" in the model of the built party by the Popular Party in the 90s.

However, in the Spain of the twentieth century there has been and there is a distinct and differentiated political tradition that fits perfectly into the category of "right." To this tradition the historian Julio Gil Pecharromán dedicates his last book, The lineage of the chameleon. A political history of the right in Spain 1937-2004 (Taurus).

It is not the first time that Gil Pecharromán assumes the task of unraveling the complex and rich history of the right in Spain. On the contrary, his extensive work makes him one of the obligatory references of Spanish historiography on the subject.

It is urgent to ask, in any case, what is the right. The birth of the right as a political category has its origin, like the left, in the French Revolution . Since then the right has been identified with a political position of defense of the status quo and the left with the vocation to overcome it. Thus, in general terms, we recognize on the right a conservative instinct and on the left a progressive drive.

However, right and left are not absolute categories but relational. This is why throughout history the ideas of conservation and progress have expressed different contents. Hence, under the «right» label in 20th-century Spain, so different positions in their relationship with the State and the economy are registered in time, for example, such as the Falange national trade unionism and the neoliberalism of some PP families. Where also diametrically opposed positions collide with regard to moral issues such as Catholic traditionalism or libertarian positions that feed on Ayn Rand's books. Not to mention the different interpretations of the Spanish national question that derive from Catholic positions.

In addition to relational, right and left are historical categories. So the political experience of each country determines the fate and content of each. In Spain, as in the case of Italy , to cite a close example, the experience of the Franco dictatorship neutralized the operability of the right category in democracy. The reason: its values, although present in society, were associated with those of authoritarianism. This is despite the fact that in the western postwar world the right and the left, when we talk about pro-system options, only differ in matters of nuance: in the way they interpret a shared democratic and social consensus.

This is a key point that connects with the question that this piece would have. Precisely, Gil Pecharromán takes charge of the difficulty that a good part of the right had in post-Francoism to operate under that political flag. The book includes, illustratively, a third of ABC entitled Are you a right? and published in 1974 by José María Ruiz Gallardón, founder of Alianza Popular, who expressed with concern that "right" had become synonymous with "a certain degree of dire regressism." And he added, "Being a right-wing today is equivalent to being retrograde, uncompromising, paralyzing, ahistorical, anti-actual, non-reformist, oppressive, anti-liberal, imperialist, almost totalitarian and a thousand other things like that ."

But in Spain, as in the rest of the world, there were rights and not few. From the end of the Civil War until the departure of La Moncloa from the Popular Party in 2004, in the Spanish political theater, both under the dictatorship and in democracy, monarchical and republican, democratic, liberal and technocratic rights have operated. Nationalist rights in the Spanish, Basque or Catalan sense and not always bad avenues, in addition to other conservative regionalisms. In parallel with the different incarnations of the extreme right, from Falange in its different versions, to Fuerza Nueva and other nostalgic Franco. All to count on the different and not always reconcilable versions of the Carlist traditionalism.

The value of the lineage of the chameleon is precisely calculated in its ability to offer an overview of this galaxy of different expressions of the right that has operated in Spanish politics from 1937 to 2004. It does, in addition, with a treatment academic, detailed and consistent that takes care of both the story about the historical trajectory of each family on the right, as well as the detail of its main programmatic and ideological characteristics.

Offering, in short, the double possibility of approaching reading as a reference book or as a story that unfolds and develops with its own internal logic.

Precisely, Gil Pecharromán's approach becomes debatable when we descend to the detail of the ideas that operate in the book as organizing principles of content. For the book is built on the thesis, strongly underlined by the title, which indicates a continuum between the right of 1937 and 2004 “in which the parties and their political personnel are juxtaposed, although modifying structures and programs depending on the situation ». A continuity that bases its political nature, we are told, on two ideas: "identity nationalism" and "the defense of a conservative society based on moral values ​​linked to the doctrine of the Catholic Church."

It is a debatable characterization, among other things because it borders on the reference to fundamental and secular values ​​of the conservative universe, as the priority given to values ​​such as order and stability within a historical continuity, present in the Spanish right from Cánovas to Rajoy. However, in the opinion of those who sign these lines, the main problem of La chameleon lineage appears when the thesis that orders the book is put at the service of an objective: to affirm that the Spanish right of the twentieth century has been neither democratic nor modernizing per se . Because it forces us to ask ourselves the following question: and to whom do we owe democracy in Spain?

Two examples. "The right of the Second Republic, with few exceptions, had not defended basic principles of democracy such as political pluralism, parliamentary representation through universal suffrage or a real separation of powers," we are told, to define, then, the path of dissidents of the same Franco regime to democracy as an "initiatory pilgrimage . "

When the reality is that enmity with the political principles of the Second Republic was not an exclusive heritage of the right. There is the complex history of the PSOE. "All these processes of democratization and modernization of societies did not reach Spain while General Franco lived," he says in another passage. Bypassing, in passing, any link between developmentalism, economic growth and conditions of democracy in Spain to which the social sciences have dedicated a few pages when explaining the requirements of successful transitions to democracy.

The chameleon race does well to point out the difficult or impossible transit of certain rights to the democratic field. At this point, Gil Pecharromán's work results in compulsory reading and devotes a good and profitable amount of pages to ultras, extremists and anti-systems families of the Spanish right. However, the game wins the vocation to describe as opportunistic and initiatory the relationship of the Spanish right with democracy to underline the idea of ​​continuum between 1937 and 2004. Thus not only is the reason and importance of the dissidence within the world of Francoism - many of which ended up, by the way, in the field of social democracy or beyond - but the story that makes the left the exclusive and genuine protagonist of democratization and modernization in Spain is forced.

But that thesis fits badly with reality. Not only because the country, society and the State were not the same in 1940 and 1975. After all, the elite of the Francoist society, with its defects and virtues, was the same elite that was divided between the parties that made the Transition , from left to right, assuming progressive and conservative roles, how could it be otherwise.

If there was any success, progress and democratic learning, therefore, it could not be less than shared. And contextualized, it is capital, not only in a common experience of the failure of the Second Republic, but also in a world of the Cold War, where the international order invited parties by different methods, generously financing them for that purpose, to abandon radicalism. and join the post-war ideological consensus. A history of ideological modernization by imitation of foreign models who knew, as well as AP and the UCD, the PSOE and the PCE. Because we are chameleons, really, everyone .

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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