And just weeks ago, the longstanding leader of the Communists, now relabelled Izquierda Unida (United Left), the dogmatic Julio Anguita, stepped down after a series of heart attacks in favour of Mr Frutos.The right warns that a Socialist-IU government would withdraw from the euro, escalate taxes and bankrupt the pensions system. Each, with its powerful trade union federation, claims to be the true voice of the workers. The Socialists used to present themselves as the left’s natural home, and sought only to marginalise their rivals, but everything changed when they lost power in 1996, weakened by scandals.With each party’s support dwindling sharply, they have come to look more kindly at one another. The main reason was Spaniards’ fear that their fledgling democracy, where military fanatics still strutted, might not survive such a provocative gesture. The success of Spain’s peaceful transition is largely due to acceptance from all quarters of the need for consensus.By the time Spaniards regained the vote after 40 years of dictatorship, the Socialists under the charismatic leadership of the young Felipe Gonzalez, a man tainted neither with Stalinism nor Francoism, appealed directly to the re-enfranchised masses and won a landslide majority in 1982.Spain’s twin working-class parties have a history of mutual loathing, blaming each other for Franco’s victory in 1939.
Spain was never tempted by the formula that brought Salvador Allende to power in Chile in 1970 or François Mitterrand in France in 1981. The left parties won 48 per cent.Although the sums are not that simple – parties to a pact may lose supporters as well as win them – on any reckoning Mr Aznar faces being outvoted. To make matters worse for him, the Catalans, who supported Felipe Gonzalez’s last minority socialist government, said last week they were prepared to back a left-wing government with a social democratic programme.It might seem astonishing that a union of the left was never proposed before during Spain’s transition to democracy, which began with Franco’s death in 1975. Behind the blizzard of denunciations lurks the fear that a left-wing pact could eject Mr Aznar’s Popular Party from power.The electoral arithmetic – which has changed little in the four years since Spain’s last election – is scary enough for the conservatives.
The PP won 39 per cent of the vote last time, fractionally ahead of its Socialist rivals, and Mr Aznar formed a government only with the support of conservative Catalan nationalists. But the attempt actually emphasises how much Spain has changed since then. Spain’s right-wingers have been stung into exaggerated claims that last week’s unity call by the Socialist leader, Joaquin Almunia, to his Communist counterpart, Francisco Frutos, would plunge Spaniards back to the divisive bitterness they have spent 25 years struggling to overcome.Some on the right are trying to conjure up images of the 1930s, when cities were destroyed by aerial bombardment and the horrors of combat were immortalised by Picasso’s Guernica, Robert Capa’s photographs and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Spain’s torpid pre-election campaign has been jolted into life by the prospect of the first alliance between communists and socialists since the 1930s civil war, when the Popular Front government was crushed by General Francisco Franco.
The conservative government of the Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, is alarmed at the possibility that such an alliance could cost him his expected second term after elections on 12 March. He urged reform of Europe’s inflexible ways, and warned that the euro would not work without modernisation and cultural change.
