This month’s general election in Spain heralds another defeat for the left in Europe, reports Denis MacShane

The shabby building in Calle Feraz just up from the bullet-marked bunkers that defended Madrid from General Franco’s assault 75 years ago is unadorned. Just a dirty red rose in a fist on a dusty sign says this is the office of the most successful socialist party of the globalisation epoch.

For 22 years out of the three-decade-long neoliberal era that began with the arrival to power of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Spain has been governed by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party.

No other left democratic party can boast such long consecutive years in power. Felipe Gonzalez and Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero headed the socialist governments. They grouped around them a smart, flexible, reforming, progressive, young cohort of men and women who liked power and most of the time knew what to do with it.

Even today Zapatero, at 47, is little older than David Cameron. But it is adios for at least four years as the general election on 20 November will see a change of government. The party office in Calle Feraz looks like Victoria Street in May 2010 as the story of a defeat foretold waits to happen.

No one, not even the most ardent PSOE activist or diputado, expects anything other than a win for the right. The conservative Partido Popular under its no-profile leader Mariano Rajoy has a secure lead precisely because it has no profile and is making no offer, ideological or in policy terms, to the electorate.

The only offer is that they are not the socialists. Indeed, since the attempted putsch in Spain when a colonel ran into the Cortes firing his submachine in the air in 1981, the Spanish right has never won a hold on the hearts or heads of the Spanish population.

The right in the 1980s was fragmented. It was up to a determined, patient, young party organiser called Jose Maria Aznar to make the PP electable in 1996. Then, all he had to do was continue the liberal economic policies of Felipe Gonzalez. The housing boom continued. Doors were opened to mass immigration – up to five million incomers in the last 15 years without any of the xenophobic hate and hysteria generated by the Daily Mail, Migration Watch and blue Labour. With entry into the euro, Spain entered low-interest heaven.

Meanwhile, having won re-election in 2000, Aznar’s PP unveiled a nastier reactionary side harking back to clericalist rightism that caused considerable dismay in a post-Franco Spain of Pedro Almodovar, endless dope and the biggest brothels in the western world.

Aznar out-Blaired Tony as the number one amigo of George W Bush. When Islamists planted a bomb at the main Madrid railway station in March 2004, the PP tried to blame the mass terrorist murder on ETA, the ugly fascistic death squads of Basque nationalism. ETA has killed more than 800 police or civil servants under Spanish democracy and Aznar hoped to link the Madrid bombing to ETA and the willingness of the socialists to seek a Northern Ireland-style peace deal.

It was a colossal misjudgement and the PP was booted out to be replaced by the young Zapatero government where half the ministers were women. A few years of progressive social legislation followed, especially on women’s rights and examining the killings of the Franco era.

But the socialists took their eye off the economic ball and allowed regional governments and savings banks to run up unsustainable debts. Spain, like Ireland, was too dependent on a housing bubble and believed, as did many in other left governments this century, that the Alan Greenspan bubble era would last forever.

When the crash happened Spain was badly exposed. Zapatero lost all economic credibility as unemployment soared to 20 per cent and one million houses or flats were left half-built or unsold. The socialists have installed a new party leader who will head the campaign but it appears to be too late. The proportional representation system means most socialist MPs’ energy has gone into getting a high place on the list system.

Rajoy and the PP have no discernible policies. They remain Europhile, even Eurofederalist and are unlikely to find common cause with the Eurosceptic UK government and the 120 Farageista Tory MPs who parrot the UKIP leader’s condemnation of all matters European.

The socialists have imposed tough austerity medicine with a five per cent cut in all public employees’ pay. Zapatero and Rajoy have agreed a balanced-budget change to the constitution. Regional governments, especially the nationalists in Barcelona, are firing thousands of doctors and nurses and closing old people’s homes.

The 30-year party in Spain has come to an abrupt end. The right has no idea of what to do. The question is how fast the socialists will rebuild once in opposition. Spain is about to join the list of EU member states now under control of the right – European social democracy is in real trouble.

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Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former minister for Europe

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Photo: Petezin