In some ways, the career of the mandarin-turned-lawyer, Rodrigo Galán, 62 and soon to retire, tracks the vagaries of Spain’s 44-year democratic experiment, and forebodes its future. In 1974, with Franco ill and indisposed, Galán tested the caudillo’s stultifying autocracy when, at an unauthorized rally eventually dispersed by riot-police, he clamoured for independent unions at Madrid’s Complutense law faculty. As someone with grandparents on both sides of the Civil War (1936-39), he cites the 1977 amnesty law as the crowning achievement of the post-Franco transition, when Spain consigned its grudges to history’s dustbin, and came together in “one big hug,” as he puts it. Thereafter, he toiled for Spain to join NATO, in 1982, and the EU, in 1986. For Galán, the development and success of Spain’s parliamentary monarchy was a very personal matter.
His affiliations have not always been consistent. Although he voted twice for the center-right prime minister, José María Aznar, Galán opposed Aznar’s decision to enter the Iraq war; and although he traces much of the country’s present ills to the premiership of Aznar’s rival, the socialist Zapatero, he meekly welcomed the latter’s election in 2004, days after Al-Qaeda retaliated against Spain by bombing the Atocha train station. In May, 2012, hurt by the 2008 crisis, and stifled by the EU’s economic straitjacket, Spaniards realized they were dangerously close to requiring a bailout, and thousands of unemployed 20-somethings, including two of Galán’s sons, marched against ‘neoliberalism’: a reaction which spawned the far-left party, Podemos. In 2018, seeing as both the PP (Partido Popular) and the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) preferred unravelling each other’s legacy to advancing middle-ground reforms, Galán voted for the centrist Ciudadanos—twice.
I met Galán recently, at a rally for the conservative party, VOX, in Madrid’s Colón square. Although he tells me he hasn’t budged politically since those heady days escaping the riot-police in ’74, VOX is “the only alternative,” he says, to the current socialist coalition of the PSOE, Podemos, and the slew of regionalist left-wing parties. He accuses PM Sánchez of many things, but one recurring charge is that of lying in his dealings with Catalan and Basque separatists. “He’ll stop at nothing to stay in power,” he rails. In several interviews leading up to the election he narrowly won in 2018, Sánchez pledged not to strike deals with secessionist regional parties, yet went on to flatly break that promise. For Galán, the bill filed two weeks ago, which would scrap ‘sedition’ from the penal code in order to exculpate those involved in Catalonia’s attempted secession in 2017, is merely the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, for thousands of fellow rally-goers, Sánchez’s government was illegitimate from the outset.
Having returned home after a decade abroad, it is, above all, this sense of polarization that dampens my hopes for Spain. Though the old tacit consensus between the PP and the PSOE had its drawbacks (it fostered stasis and cushioned corruption), Galán waxes nostalgic about a time when the socialists could be trusted to serve the Spanish state in all of the expected ways: honouring the king, respecting the separation of powers, and enforcing the equality of all Spaniards under the law. For Galán, today’s socialists are beyond the pale, and those among his friends who do not protest against Sánchez’s silent coup are complicit in it. The PM is acclaiming the Second Republic (which oversaw untold levels of violence and repression against Catholics), trampling on the independent judiciary, and making suicidal concessions to his regionalist coalition partners. He seems, Galán tells me, “embarked on a last-ditch effort to remake Spain in a leftist mould,” which, in his view, would lead to an irrevocable abandonment of the certainties established during the post-Franco transition.
The political elite that Galán joined in the late 1970s played a crucial role in nurturing progress and concord, but now it seems more polarized than the people themselves. Last week, Irene Montero, the Minister for Equality and wife of Podemos’ ponytailed leader, Pablo Iglesias, called the VOX parliamentary group “a gang of fascists” exercising “political violence,” after VOX MP, Carla Toscano, had questioned her qualifications for the Ministry. Meanwhile, Galán’s fellow rally-goers exhibited a similar rancour against Sánchez’s allies, calling them “criminals,” “traitors,” and everything in between. Although it might be sensationalist to liken our current predicament to that which preceded the Civil War, dismissing such political vitriol would be careless. “The Left is out to exact revenge on those of us who refused to go along with their communist agenda in the 1930s,” Galán tells me. Given Spain’s past, one can only hope history doesn’t run in cycles.
