The Spanish Elections Demonstrate the Importance of the Culture War

'Everything points to Spain being Europe’s Venezuela, and the government will ultimately be chosen by all of Spain’s enemies'.

From The European Conservative

By Itxu Díaz

Everything points to Spain being Europe’s Venezuela, and the government will ultimately be chosen by all of Spain’s enemies.

The conservative culture war is a media war throughout the West. For too many years all Spanish media power has been shared between the Left and the extreme Left, with a few centrist concessions. The PP has done nothing to balance the scales when it had the chance. On the contrary, it gave new concessions to left-wing media in the hope that they would be friendlier towards them. Naturally, they weren’t. And of course, the Right is still at a clear disadvantage in Spain in the culture war. That is the only explanation as to why the socialist Pedro Sánchez and his communist allies, whom all the polls had forecast as the loser, won about 7,700,000 votes against the PP’s (Partido Popular) approximately 8,000,000 in the general elections—a bitter win for the PP’s centrist Núñez Feijóo. 

The electoral strategy of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) has consisted of accusing the center-right PP of making a pact with what they call “the ultra-right of VOX.” All throughout the campaign, Feijóo struggled to counter these accusations and go on the attack. Moreover, he wasted time saying a thousand times that he preferred to pact with the PSOE than with VOX because the right-wing party would not be a reliable partner, equating a hypothetical pact with VOX to the PSOE’s pact with Bildu, the philo-terrorist heirs of ETA—as if Ortega Lara’s party (and that of other ETA victims) were equivalent to the party of their kidnappers and other terrorist foot soldiers. Feijóo’s PP is still convinced that VOX stole three million votes and, as stupid as it may seem, its leaders believe that it has no right to do so, that those voters still belong to them. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid who represents a less self-conscious PP, achieved an absolute majority in Madrid without spending a single second attacking or insulting VOX. But Feijóo did not want to learn the lesson.

The overreaction of PP leaders to the positions of VOX helped mobilize the vote on the Left. Feijoo’s party eased the public opinion’s acceptance of Sanchez’s mantras about the risk of ‘fascism’ in the government. The lost media battle meant that political talk shows and opinion columns would be constantly saturated with dire predictions that, under a conservative government, women’s rights would regress, homosexuals would be expelled from public life, and illegal immigrants would be little less than executed at dawn. 

Yet no political contest exists without paradox. Although part of the problem has been caused by PP itself, the solution also lies with them. Perhaps the Right has never had it so easy to expel the PSOE from the government, after five years of incompetent, communist, sectarian, and at times openly ridiculous government. (For example, it is impossible to forget the campaigns of the ministry of equality urging men to have sex with girls on their periods, or the ministry’s app to record the household chores shared between a couple, or the ridiculous toy strike with which the ministry of consumer affairs wanted to prevent girls from asking for dolls —and boys for balls—for Christmas.) 

Another chilling fact: the government that presumes to be feminist released more than a hundred rapists and pedophiles from prison and reduced the sentences of more than a thousand others, and still has not been sunk in the elections. This is only possible if the media machinery is completely in your favor, if you are losing the culture war. 

The Left has a hard time coming to power in Spain, but when it does, it is very difficult to oust them. During the government of the socialist Felipe González, despite being surrounded by cases of corruption and even state crimes, he did not go down in the elections until ETA tried to kill the leader of the opposition, the then PP candidate José María Aznar, by blowing up his car. Aznar survived the attack, and his reaction, serene but firm against terrorism, was the definitive push to place him in La Moncloa. 

The socialists returned to power in 2004 after the biggest media manipulation campaign in the history of Spanish democracy, which followed two days after the 11M terrorist attack. During that election, Spaniards went to vote whilst thousands of people surrounded the PP headquarters shouting “murderers,” blaming Aznar and the Iraq war for the attack, while the corpses were still warm and thousands of wounded were on the verge of death. Socialist media terminals gleefully reported every second.

Rajoy’s PP won a historic absolute majority in the 2011 elections, thanks to the ruin that Zapatero’s PSOE left in the public coffers and on the streets. Rajoy did not do much in opposition; he simply waited to inherit the throne. His strategy worked well enough; however, since then a good part of PP leaders believe that elections can be won without making a stand, without entering into any of the major cultural debates, simply by waiting for the socialists to finish ruining the economy and people to get fed up. It did not work for Feijóo. 

The first thing that conservatives can learn from PP’s impotence in Spain is that it is impossible to win a battle if you do not take part in the fighting. Second, and perhaps more important, figure out who the real enemy is. And third, stop trusting that the Left will someday give you an excuse to exist. For the postmodern Left, Aznar was a fascist, Rajoy was a fascist, and Feijóo is a fascist, and VOX is the ‘extreme Right,’ just as they insist that Trump is a fascist, along with Bush, and, of course, whoever leads the Republican party tomorrow will also be a fascist—even if he converts to Islam, becomes trans, and confesses that he once voted for Obama. 

Incidentally, among Feijóo’s campaign pearls is the confession that he voted for the socialist Felipe González in 1982, and the promise that if he becomes president he will call him up to consult him every so often. This is all very well, and I don’t care if he sets up a Ouija board and calls the spirit of Bin Laden to consult him on penitentiary policy; but to say it in public is a mistake, and to think that this will attract socialist votes is to be ignorant of the totalitarian nature of the Left. 

In short, we do not yet know what will happen with Spain’s ungovernable government. But Sánchez is at the helm: think the worst and you will probably be right. Everything points to Spain being Europe’s Venezuela, and the government will ultimately be chosen by all of Spain’s enemies, including the Castro-worshiping communists, the political heirs of ETA, and the Catalan coup plotters. Whatever comes out of it, it is bad news for Europe, which has lost in Spain a golden opportunity to move forward with the change that Meloni is bringing about in Italy. 

The good news is that Spaniards are fighters. History backs us up. We are a bit like Real Madrid. Try not to push us against the ropes because that really gets us going. I still remember the Champions League meme from last year, the year of Madrid’s great comebacks, in which Guardiola, already eliminated, was seen shouting at Klopp: “Jürgen, don’t score a goal against them, it’s a damned trap!” And Spain’s enemies are scoring against us now.