‘Everybody’s lost but me,’ mutters a teenage Indiana Jones emerging from a cave in the middle of the desert to find that the boy scouts with whom he arrived have now disappeared without trace. Spain’s left-wing prime minister might be excused for thinking much the same. Relentlessly upbeat about the benefits of immigration, Pedro Sánchez now finds himself more or less alone in the European Union. And just when he was hoping that fellow progressive Kamala Harris would win the US election, he finds instead that he’s going to have to contend with Donald Trump.
‘We will work on our strategic bilateral relations and a strong transatlantic partnership,’ Sánchez said, presumably between gritted teeth, in his message of congratulation. It was left to his deputy prime minister Yolanda Díaz to say what he couldn’t: ‘Trump’s victory is bad news for everyone who understands politics as the means to improve lives rather than poison them with hate and misinformation.’
For some, Trump’s victory shows how ineffective the fight against fascism has been
And it’s not just the politicians. I haven’t seen the centre-left El País, one of Spain’s leading national dailies and the progressive newspaper of record, in such paroxysms of fury since Britain had the temerity to vote for Brexit. Trump is going to hand power to a cohort of ‘paranoid racists’ thundered the editorial. ‘Trump has won by promoting vengeance, rancour, lies, hatred, insult and confrontation,’ railed one columnist. ‘The most powerful country in the world has just voted in the most capricious, false, unpredictable and amoral character ever to appear on the political stage of an advanced democracy,’ wailed another. For others, the victory of this ‘racist buffoon’ was a victory ‘for the beast that lies inside us all’.
It seems that for Spain’s self-styled progressives Trump’s latest victory is all part of ‘the rapid advance of extremism in the Western world… The first major warning was Brexit in 2016, followed by Trump’s victory the same year, and then …. Meloni in Italy, Wilders in the Netherlands … Bolsonaro in Brazil and Milei in Argentina.’ Trump’s victory confirms ‘the exultation of xenophobia and the erosion of democracy’.
But explaining Trump’s victory is much trickier than denouncing it. Trump won, ventured one El País columnist, because he appealed to the ignorant and the poorly educated who believed his talk of ‘a swarm of uncontrolled immigrants made up of criminals, rapists, and murderers who eat decent citizens’ pets’. Or perhaps Harris lost for the same reason that Hillary Clinton did: because the country is not yet ready to elect a woman. La Sexta, a left-leaning free-to-air television channel, announced that it all goes to show that ‘lies win elections’. (It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that rational voters might simply have compared Trump’s previous administration with these last four years of Democrat presidency and decided that on balance they preferred the former.)
For Spain’s left-wingers, the ‘nightmare’ into which the world will now be plunged does however have some upsides. One member of Sánchez’s government is reported to have suggested that another Trump administration will finally bring home to people the real and powerful dangers of a far-right government. Another insisted that Trump’s victory will ‘be a spur to the progressive world to do better’. Above all, government sources declared, ‘It’s time for Europe to move towards full political union. Europe needs to be strengthened, and Trump’s victory will spur us on to that end’.
But some politicians didn’t need to hunt for silver linings. Reacting with undisguised joy, Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, Spain’s most right-wing party, highlighted ‘the importance of the Hispanic vote in this victory for the free world’ and announced that ‘now is the hour of patriots. Now is the hour of freedom’.
But at the opposite end of the political spectrum, for Podemos, the party which is currently making its continued support for Sánchez conditional on the severance of ‘commercial and diplomatic relations with the genocidal state of Israel’, Trump’s victory shows how ineffective the fight against fascism has been. On that theme, the day before the election, under a photograph of Trump with his arm aloft, apparently in Nazi salute, El País ran an article comparing Trump’s views to those of the Nazis.
‘Nazis,’ says the grown-up Indiana Jones, peering into a room full of Hitler’s henchmen, ‘I hate these guys.’
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