As a man who dreams daily of defenestrating the Spanish Socialists and setting his own party on their leftist throne, Pablo Iglesias is perhaps not the most impartial observer of the very public war that has devoured the PSOE party this week.
And yet the Podemos leader’s analysis of the attempted coup against his PSOE counterpart, Pedro Sánchez, was neither gleefully apocalyptic nor giddily triumphant. The current turmoil, he noted this week, is “the most important crisis since the end of the civil war in the most important Spanish party of the past century”.
Years of simmering discontent with Sánchez finally boiled over on Wednesday. Three days earlier, the PSOE had performed disastrously in regional elections in Galicia and the Basque country, finishing behind Podemos in both polls. Those results, combined with the PSOE’s poor showing in December and June’s inconclusive general elections, appeared too much for some.
Felipe González, the political powerhouse who led the party to four election victories in the 1980s and 90s, spoke out midweek, accusing Sánchez of lying to him.
In the days following the June election, said González, Sánchez had assured him that he was going to respect the wishes of many in the PSOE by dropping his objection to allowing Mariano Rajoy, the leader of the conservative People’s party, (PP) to form a minority government.
But despite growing pressure to give in – thereby breaking the political deadlock that has left Spain without a government for nine months – Sánchez bluntly refused, saying he would do nothing to facilitate the return to office of a party as thoroughly steeped in corruption allegations as the PP.
Hours after González’s intervention, half of the PSOE’s executive committee resigned. The anti-Sánchez lobby had calculated that the move would force the dissolution of the committee, unseat the leader and leave the party in the hands of a caretaker team. It did not.
Sánchez and his supporters argue that party rules make it clear that he is still in charge and have called a meeting of the PSOE’s 295-member federal committee on Saturday. At the top of the agenda will be plans to hold a back-me-or-sack-me leadership contest on 23 October.
With neither side giving ground – nor quarter – the skirmishes will only get bloodier as the battle for the soul of the party intensifies. Just to make matters worse, the deadline is looming for the formation of a new government: if party leaders cannot reach a compromise by 31 October, King Felipe will dissolve parliament and Spain will find its Christmas interrupted by its third general election in just over a year.
Antonio Barroso, an analyst at the political risk advisory firm Teneo Intelligence, says that while internal conflict is nothing new in the PSOE, the current levels of “entrenchment and acrimony” are unprecedented.
According to Pablo Simón, a political science professor at Madrid’s Carlos III University, this week’s internecine strife has once again shown that few things are more dangerous than a botched coup.
“You have to be a bit careful with the analogy, but when someone makes an internal move to bring about a coup and that coup fails, you get a civil war between two camps,” he says.
“And that’s exactly where we are now: two camps who both claim irreconcilable legitimacy and who will finally have to come face to face tomorrow.”
Other analogies suggest themselves, too. Simón refers to the party’s drama as “the Corbynisation of the PSOE”. Like his British counterpart, Sánchez can be viewed – through his opposition to doing deals with the PP – as a man of principle banking on grassroots support to keep him safe from attacks from his colleagues.
Similarly, Susana Díaz, the PSOE leader in Andalucía and his likeliest challenger, portrays herself as a figure trying to reconnect the party with disgruntled voters and save it from the overriding interests of a single individual.
Sánchez’s electoral record has been deeply disappointing and he has alienated not only colleagues and voters but also external supporters. In an excoriating editorial on Thursday, El País called him an “unscrupulous fool who would rather destroy the party he has led so calamitously than recognise his enormous failure”.
“It’s undeniable that the party has had its worst results under Sánchez,” says Barroso. “But the decline of PSOE did not start with him.”
He points to the radical economic U-turn performed by the then Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero as he struggled to deal with the financial crisis in 2010. Barroso says the move, which badly damaged voter trust, was compounded by the PSOE’s delay in renewing itself under Sánchez’s predecessor, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba.
Add to that the emergence of Podemos, shifting territorial politics – not to mention a wider political malaise – and the reasons for both Sánchez’s woes and those of his party become painfully clear.
“Why is the PSOE eating itself away?” asks Simón. “There’s the crisis of international social democracy, plus memories of Zapatero’s economic management, plus the pro-independence process that has deprived it of its key store of votes in Catalonia, plus a rival party to its left that is taking its votes from under-35s and those on peripheral areas.
“These four simultaneous crises make it very difficult to lead the party no matter who the leader is.”
Regardless of what happens in Saturday’s meeting and over the coming days, the prognosis for the PSOE is bleak. And while many will blame Sánchez’s obstinacy for bolstering Rajoy’s position and driving some socialist voters into the wide-flung arms of Podemos and its allies, the party’s troubles run far deeper than one man’s failings.
