Challenging Austerity

Radical Left and Social Movements in the South of Europe

Beltrán Roca, Emma Martín-Díaz, Ibán Díaz-Parra, Beltrán Roca, Emma Martín-Díaz, Ibán Díaz-Parra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315438078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book analyses social movements and radical political parties' strategies in Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy from 2008 to today. Events in 2011 such as the Arab Spring and the indignados movement in Spain initiated a new cycle of social protest. This book explores how the economic crisis and policies of austerity have transformed and continue to transform social movements, trade unions and radical political parties in Southern Europe.

The economic crisis has led to a rise in protest movements, which confront political institutions and conventional forms of democracy, and develop new spatial and organisational strategies. This book examines these cases, in addition to those groups who, contrastingly, have used institutional politics to achieve their aims, such as new political parties like Podemos in Spain or Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy.

Analysing the extent to which there has been a change in approach when it comes to contesting neo-liberal capitalism, this book makes an important contribution to the study of social movements and radical politics. With a comparative perspective and an emphasis on studying the largely unexplored recent social and political dynamics in the European periphery, this book is essential reading for students, scholars and activists interested in social movements, radical politics and European politics more generally.

1 Radical Left in Portugal and Spain (1960–2010)

Julio Pérez Serrano

The Iberian transitions to democracy: intertwined processes

In the mid-1970s Portugal and Spain experienced change processes with remarkable similarities, as they affected authoritarian regimes installed during the inter-war period in a context of parliamentarism crisis. Although analogies exist, what happened in Greece was very different, because the military dictatorship installed in 1967 was the result of the Cold War (Soto 2009, 12). During the 1960s, Iberian dictatorships had evolved in the same direction, taking advantage of international economic growth to implement liberalizing policies managed by technocrats trained under Opus Dei. In Spain, the enactment of the Organic Law of 1967 (Ley Orgánica del Estado) led to a certain political opening with the so-called “organic democracy”, which coincided in Portugal with the primavera marcelista (Marcellist spring), a period of relative modernization and limited political liberalization promoted by Marcelo Caetano, after the withdrawal of Oliveira Salazar in 1968 (Rico 1974, 34–40). But neither the economic growth nor the timid aperturismo (policy of liberalization) avoided the wear and tear of the dictatorships. The internal division and the rise of social mobilization, encouraged by an increasingly active opposition, sharpened the crisis of both regimes in the early 1970s.

However, there are important differences between the two processes. In Spain the army, purged after the civil war, remained faithful to the regime, while in Portugal the Armed Forces became the determining agent of political change (Oliveira 1975). Thus, in Portugal the break came on April 25, 1974 by a military pronouncement known as the Revolução dos Cravos (Carnation Revolution), played by the middle cadres of the army (the “captains”) with a democratic and socializing orientation (Sánchez Cervelló 1997). The military malaise, initially provoked by a corporate rejection to the new system of promotions, ended up promoting a democratic uprising with socialist borders that caused the dictatorship to fall. The opposition of the officers to the colonial war in Angola and Mozambique certainly contributed thereto (Campinos 1981, 173). In Spain, the conflict in Western Sahara, active in the same years, did not have the same effects, since the government, fearing that what happened in Portugal could be replicated in Spain, chose to hand over the territory to Morocco and Mauritania in the controversial Tripartite Agreement of Madrid, signed on November 14, 1975.

This proactive role of the Armed Forces made it possible for Portugal to materialize a democratic rupture, which is the fundamental difference with the so-called Spanish “transition” based on political reform (Pérez Serrano 2016). While in Portugal the legality of the dictatorship was abrogated and the elements committed to the regime were purged of the administration, in Spain the change allowed for the survival of Franco’s legality (under the motto “from law to law”) and continuity of the elites, institutions and symbols of the dictatorship. In Portugal the institutionalization of democracy was in the hands of a provisional government formed by the opposition, while in Spain the reins were always in the hands of Franco’s heirs. As for the form of government, Portugal restored the Republic and Spain retained the monarchy that had been re-established after the death of Franco under the Act of Succession of 1947 and the Decree of 1969 in which Franco appointed successor to the then, “Prince” Juan Carlos de Borbón.

From April 1974 to November 1975 in Portugal there was a revolutionary crisis that coincided in Spain with an intense mobilization that was harshly repressed by the late Francoist government of Arias Navarro. Nevertheless, at the end of 1975, with the disappearance of Franco and the almost simultaneous fall of the pro-communist government of Vasco Gonçalves, who carried out the agrarian reform and the nationalization of the main means of production, both processes, so different in origin, ended up converging in a scenario of moderation and stability. In Spain, the negative image of the Portuguese revolution spread by the government acted as a vaccine to avoid contagion, while in Portugal the Spanish transition functioned as an antidote to re-establish social order (Sánchez Cervelló 1995). Between 1976 and 1978, the hardness of the economic crisis and the pressure of the Western powers, with the incentive of entry into the EEC, shaped a more docile citizenship, ready to accept the so- called “social costs” of modernization.

Renewed socialist parties reached the government by electoral means, pushing for deep liberalizing structural reforms, under the vigilant tutelage of the US and European Community institutions. Under the influence of the Socialist International and the SPD (Ortuño Anaya 2005), Iberian socialism was re-founded on the basis of pragmatism and moderation. The Portuguese PS was founded in 1973 in the German city of Bad Münstereifel, under the auspices of the SPD (Chilcote 2010, 223), and the PSOE was re- founded in 1974, in the Congress of Suresnes, turning towards the center- left, which made possible the alternation with the new center- right, emerged in both countries during regime change (Andrade Blanco 2012). All this forced the withdrawal of communist parties, hegemonic in the years of struggle against dictatorships, and marked the end of the revolutionary projects that emerged in the 1960s.

During the 1980s, the new international context that began to be seen with the crisis of the socialist system and the full insertion of China in the World system left no reference to radical organizations and promoted in them an intense debate. Some groups disappeared or were entrenched in the armed struggle, while others evolved, giving rise in the last decade of the century to new organizations that integrated ideals and values of the radical project with the experience of the new social movements. In the case of Portugal, this reconversion was reflected in the convergence of very heterogeneous parties (Maoists and Trotskyists) in the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc), founded in 1999 (Soeiro 2009). In Spain, there was a first attempt of regrouping promoted by the PCE in 1986, with the creation of Izquierda Unida (United Left). Shortly afterwards, in 1991, the merger of former Maoists and Trotskyists led to the Izquierda Alternativa (Alternative Left), which was dissolved in 1993. With the revival of social movements in the heat of the 2008 crisis, new attempts have been made to rebuild the radical space around a new political force, Podemos (We can), created in 2014.

Radical projects in Spain and Portugal

After the Second World War there was a favorable political context for the spread of communist ideas. The renewed prestige of the USSR, due to its role in the victory over Nazi- fascism, was increased from 1949 by the dialect...