Our Fractured Polities
Recent events in Spain and Israel confirm something important about the politics of the present
Regular readers know that one of the points I make regularly in my writing about the rise of right-wing populism is that the specter of unified, enduring authoritarian rule isn’t our most proximal problem. Our most proximal problem is our dividedness.
The relatively minor policy disputes of the so-called neoliberal, immediate post-Cold War period (raise or lower taxes a little; increase or decrease regulation a bit; admit somewhat more or fewer immigrants) have given way to much more fundamental disagreements that touch on questions of cultural or national identity: Who are we? As long as the right and left were in broad agreement about the answer to that question, political disagreements were pretty trivial, with the stakes in any given election quite low, however heated the public rhetoric of partisans might become.
But that is no longer true. That’s because over the past decade, in countries around the world, new and old parties of the right have begun dissenting in a much more sweeping way from the broadly liberal status quo. We don’t just want to fiddle with tax rates, regulatory policy, and immigration rules. We want our polity to become something else, to stand for something else, to reflect and express my strongly held moral and religious convictions in a more emphatic way than it currently does. I feel like my country is becoming unworthy of love. I want to see it changed so that is no longer true, even if that means you begin to consider it unlovable instead.
It would be one thing if right-wing populism were surging in popularity, taking over governments with firm, stable majorities that provide a mandate for sweeping change in an anti-liberal direction. It would be another if right-wing populism had already peaked and was now being routed in countries around the world in favor of a return to something like the neoliberal consensus of the last few decades. But neither is happening. What we have in most places, instead, is a war of attrition—right-populists barely winning or barely losing. Our polities are fractured, unsettled, deeply but also very narrowly divided, with something close to half the citizens wanting their country to be one thing and something close to half the citizens wanting their country to be something else.
Recent events in Spain and Israel confirm this.
The Spanish Fault Line
Heading into Spain’s election on Sunday, most observers expected the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to lose out to the center-right People’s Party (PP), whose leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, had made clear his intention to form a government with Vox, a far-right populist party.
Had Vox won 16 percent of the vote, as polls were predicting a year ago, this might have been the outcome. Instead, Vox won just 12.4 percent (down nearly 3 points from its showing in elections four years ago). The center-right PP, meanwhile, surged quite a lot since 2019, from 20.8 percent in previous parliamentary elections to 33.1 percent on Sunday. That was enough to make PP the plurality winner (by 1.4 points over PSOE)—but not enough to secure a majority with Vox’s 12.4 points. (Together the two parties won 45.5 percent of the vote.)
Feijóo insists he will try to form a minority government with Vox, claiming the party that won the most votes should have that privilege. But for now, at least, PP and Vox don’t have enough backing by smaller parties to make that work.
That leaves open several possibilities. The first involves Sánchez and his preferred partner (Yolanda Díaz’s Sumar coalition of small left-wing parties) securing enough backing (or lack of opposition) from smaller, regional or separatist parties after they fail to reach a majority during the new parliament’s first round of voting on forming a government. (After the first round, a minority government can be approved if it receives more yeas than nays.)
But this presumes Sánchez first receives the nod from Spain’s King Felipe VI on taking the lead in trying to form a new government. If, instead, the king bows to Feijóo’s claims about his plurality victory entitling him to get the chance to form a minority government first, Sánchez will be out of luck—though most analysts think the right will have a harder time securing the necessary backing (or lack of opposition) from smaller parties.
That leaves what might be the most likely scenario: The need to call for another election in the fall.
Would that produce an outcome different enough that the impasse between right and left could be broken and a majority government formed? We’ll have to see—and also see whether that would prove the end of an unsettled period or the start of a new one. Israel just endured a cycle of several elections in quick succession that repeatedly yielded unviable, or barely viable, results. Until, that is, the country’s current right-wing government was formed following its most recent election in late 2022. But that outcome has done nothing to resolve the country’s differences. On the contrary, it has only served to heighten them.
The Israeli Fault Line
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