The Socialist-Labor split in Spain

Spain held elections June 15 for deputies to the European Parliament, and for the first time since Franco died, the socialist UGT trade union did not call on its members to vote for the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE). The union offered two reasons for its decision: opposition to the government's social and economic policies, and the government's failure to respond to the demands of the December 1988 general strike.

As it turned out, the PSOE lost just one seat in Strasbourg, and although the Communist-led United Left gained one, it is hard to draw any conclusions from the elections regarding domestic politics. Abstention reached 45 percent, a record high which skewed the results in favor of small parties. But it is fairly safe to say that the PSOE, which is down to 6 million votes from the 10 million it won when it swept into power in 1982, could lose its absolute majority in Parliament by the next elections, which must be held by 1990.

The PSOE not only lost the support of the UGT in the electoral arena, but for the first time was not invited to the union's May I celebration. Hundreds of thousands of people around the country marched to protest the government's economic and social policies in May 1 demonstrations co-sponsored by the UGT and the Communist-led CCOO; thc two had not joined hands on May 1 since the PSOE won the 1982 elections.

The U.S. press expressed some bewilderment then at the trade unions' uprising against Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez. Coverage of the massive December 14 general strike was inevitably prefaced and followed by laudatory descriptions of Gonzalez as a misunderstood innovator whose antiquated former allies-the unions-do not have the necessary vision to modernize the country. Readers saw few attempts to explain what convinced the unions to strike; the embattled Felipe Gonzalez and his "supply-side socialism" continually stole the show. In one 39-paragraph post-strike piece, the New York Times waited until the 36th paragraph to tell us that unemployment in Spain currently stands at 19 percent.

The supposedly ironic situation of a left-wing government being struck by the unions is not that surprising if one takes a good look at the PSOE, its policies, and its ideology.

The PSOE's driving ideological impulse is to stay in power and, through appointments and patronage, to dominate all spheres of public life. It is not a left-wing party that turned right, for the simple reason that it was never left-wing. It was founded in the early 1970s, on the eve of Franco's death, with its eye on winning the elections, which it did in 1982. In the words of former centrist Premier Adolfo Suarez, "it makes no sense to try to describe the PSOE in ideological terms." It is a party of technocrats, functionaries, and political appointees whose aim is to consolidate itself into a hegemonic force and whose future would seriously be imperiled if it were to lose the elections. In 1984 the party said it had 150,000 members, of whom one-third held public office.

"They govern on the basis of public opinion polls, and believe that what they lose on the left they can pick up on the right," complained UGT Secretary-General Nicolas Redondo. Unlike the Labor Party in Britain, or even the socialist parties in other Western European countries, the PSOE has no base of long-time members who can keep a party politically alive. Its only claim to the grass roots is the UGT, and those ties have been severely damaged.

Since 1977, the year of Spain's first elections after Franco's death, the government, unions, and management have worked out general parameters on wages that apply to all sectors. In later years, the CCOO dropped out, but the UGT accepted the economic sacrifices Gonzalez insisted were necessary to move the country along. Unemployment edged up every year as major industries were restructured and tens of thousands laid off, wages lagged behind inflation, and social programs remained vastly insufficient. Supplyside socialism seemed to be doing little for working people, the poor, the jobless, and the retired, but the frenetic desire to modernize and make Spain a full-fledged member of the EEC and the Western industrialized world convinced the UGT, at least, that sacrifices were in order.

Until last year, that is. Business profits were up 100 percent in 1987 over the previous year. Bank profits have risen 25 percent in each of the last two years. Conspicuous consumption is rampant, even among socialist leaders. The newspapers and magazines breathlessly follow hostile takeovers and bank mergers as if they were aristocratic marriages, which often they are. With all this money, the unions reasoned, the time for sacrifice was over. With economist Paul Samuelson declaring that the Spanish economy was another "Japanese miracle," and with the country claiming Europe's highest growth rate in 1988 (5 percent), it was time to share the pie.

The unions met with the government throughout last year and finally put forth five points they said were non-negotiable: the withdrawal of a Youth Employment Plan which would have created a two-tier wage system, the extension of unemployment benefits to 48 percent of the nation's jobless (the current level is 33 percent), a retroactive 2 percent increase in 1987 pensions and public-sector wages, raising pensions up to the minimum wage ($385 a month), and granting civil servants collective bargaining rights. The government refused, the unions walked out and the strike was called.

One of the most remarkable things about the protest was that the UGT and CCOO acted together. The PSOE used that unity as an opportunity to red-bait the strike, in a campaign led by former Communist theoretician Fernando Claudin, who was also the PSOE's chief communist-basher during the 1985 campaign to withdraw from NATO.

The PSOE's response to the strike call only spurred on the workers and led many editorialists who certainly did not favor the strike to lament the government's arrogance and obstinacy. Rather than point fingers at conspiratorial communists and deny the existence of sound arguments on the unions' side"the socialists should learn the lesson that the social democratic

program requires less arrogance, more negotiation, and greater sensitivity . . . ," editorialized the country's leading daily, El Pais.

Beneath the breakdown was the PSOE's attitude toward the party-union relationship, one of the linchpins of European social democracy. Party and union were traditionally seen as a partnership, but over the past few years the PSOE has come to regard the UGT as an antiquated nuisance, and the usual components of a social democratic system-social services, a strong public sector, and social pacts-are either in decline or, in the case of the pacts, dead. Services are notoriously scarce and inefficient, the public sector is quickly being privatized, and the government would much rather speak to management than to the unions.

The party-union schism is perhaps more important in Spain than elsewhere in Europe because it was the UGT that kept the socialist flame alive, though faintly, throughout the years of the Franco regime. The PSOE really re-emerged only in 1974, at a special congress in France at which Gonzalez was elected SecretaryGeneral. His opponent, who stepped aside, was Nicolas Redondo, today the Secretary-General of the UGT. Since then, the UGT has provided the PSOE with its socialist identity and popular base, and the perenially tie-less Redondo marks a sharp contrast to the glamorous and wealthy party bosses, whose lifestyle provoked even the powerful Catholic Church to rebuke the emphasis on "selfish materialism over social solidarity." Newspaper readers are familiar with the efforts of former PSOE Economy Minister Miguel Boyer to build a mansion in downtown Madrid and the resignation of state television director Pilar Miro after it was discovered she had spent $35,000 of her budget on her wardrobe. The cohesion between union and party is not aided by such news.

The main reason the PSOE has been able to get away with 'Its behavior is that up until recently it had no competition. Despite the Communists' strength in trade union politics, they have little electoral capacity and were badly hurt a few years ago by splits. On the right, in-fighting and incompetence have prevented an effective challenge to the PSOE's absolute majority, although the recent information of the conservative Popular Party under the leadership of Manuel Fraga, and Fraga's municipal pacts with Adolfo Suarez, may change things.

The unions, and the left in general, have been ineffective in reaping the benefits of having put the government on the defensive last December. If the PSOE is losing its grip on absolute power, it is just as much due to its own errors and the erosion that comes with six years in power as it is to pressure from labor.

The left wing of the trade union movement has criticized union leadership for squandering its gains, accusing it of being afraid to carry through on its threat to organize more and more mobilizations for fear that control over the agitation might pass over to more radical labor clements. The enormous success of the December 14 strike showed that the unions did well to widen their scope of attention, especially to include the unemployed and students, whose militancy sometimes breaks traditional rules.

The unions did convoke nationwide work stoppages on April 27, as a prelude to May 1 (a national holiday), and an estimated one million people participated. But since December the labor movement has become bogged down in sector-by-sector negotiations, due to the failure to establish a global pact last year. This means the country is frequently hit by strikes that create a sense of exasperation and immobility. Furthermore, it returns trade union activity to the familiar mode of top-level negotiations, almost as if the general strike, with all its revolutionary potential-it brought tears to the eyes of anyone who had participated in the fight against Franco-had never happened.

COPYRIGHT 1989 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group