I did not become the foreign correspondent that reading Robert Fisk threatened to turn me into. But at least my lowly paid (but high-status!) professorship at Madrid’s IE Business School means I now get to hang out with them. A typical week could see an invite to an Embassy reception followed by a working lunch at an obscure think-tank a day later.

A particular favourite of mine is the freshly squeezed orange juice at Nueva Economía Fórum breakfasts in the Hotel Ritz. More of a struggle is the Club de Madrid, where you could find yourself deep in conversation with the ex-Prime Minister of a Latin American country in exile (“Manuel Noriega should have been given more time, etc.”).  

A café con leche with the regular stringers from the WSJ, the FT and The Economist is always a good hour spent but less fun is time with visiting scribes who call up to meet you “on background”. I don’t have a lot of choice, however. Nicole Kidman’s character in To Die For was not wrong when she said: “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV.” The view of many MBA students is that no elective is worth taking unless the professor is on TV.

The best of them can have a nuanced conversation about the late foreign correspondent Marie Colvin but you know that there is going to be a problem when you sight a well thumbed copy of Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls or George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Not for them are the well researched Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 or Paul Preston’s The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge.

No. For a certain type of Spanish literature major, it’s always 1936 and the question of what Spain would be today if only very obvious good had triumphed over very obvious evil.

My arrival in Madrid some twenty years ago coincided with a period of prosperity. The two Spains of Spanish poet Antonio Machado existed in a cultural sense but the economic policy of both was much the same. Both believed in the mighty brick and got on with the business of “build, baby, build”.

Construction is unparalleled in its ability to reward cronies. In Spain, as elsewhere, there ain’t no bubble more inflatable than a housing bubble. You can borrow against it and you can borrow for it. You can build a pretend economy. All of this came to an end on June 10, 2012, when the Economy Minister Luis De Guindos called the Eurogroup to request a €100 billion euros credit line. Then Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy went to Gdansk to watch Spain play Italy in the European Football Championship. I mean, a banking bailout was hardly enough of a reason to miss that.

In 2017, the Audit Court found that the cost to taxpayers of cleaning up the Spanish banking system came in at €41.8 billion. A tidy sum but as was pointed out at the time ad nauseam, nothing like Ireland, who had to spend 37.3 per cent of its annual economic output, or Greece, who spent 24.8 per cent.  

It would be wrong to say that Spain does not have an industrial base. Spain does make things like cars and trains. It’s the second-most visited country in the world and the three Fs of fashion, food and football exert a cultural influence throughout the world. But what Spain doesn’t have is the Mittelstand of Germany, the long-term industrial planning policy of South Korea or the unicorns of Sweden.

My colleague at IE Business School, Ignacio de la Torre, is very clear about the three biggest economic challenges facing the new government: First, get the fiscal deficit to the level of the other Eurozone numbers by reducing expenses and raising taxes. Next, face the enormous challenge of the low productivity of its workers and its disastrous consequence in the form of low wages. Finally, Spain must address the enormous imbalance that has emerged between large population centres and medium-sized cities.

As economic challenges, they are nothing not also being faced by other Eurozone countries. The Spanish general election this Sunday to elect the 15th Cortes Generales of the Kingdom of Spain should be about these issues. Instead though, we have got everything else.

The incumbents: “Mr Handsome” and “Yoli”

Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón has been Prime Minister of Spain since June 2018. He is running on a centre-left platform of protecting the welfare state and generally getting along with people. It is also a very European model of government. After a series of non-English speaking Prime Ministers, Pedro has put Spain back in the centre of the EU, and is to be found at the centre of every important decision taken by the EU.

A tall man aged 51, a series of “Mr Handsome” memes gently chide the girlishness of Ursula von der Leyen around him. I’ve never met him but until recently I worked with his wife Begoña in the Africa Centre in IE Business School, where we would travel together to places like Ghana to promote the school. In Spain, where everything she does is under scrutiny, she is very guarded but outside of Spain she is a much more relaxed travelling companion. With Pedro is the equally adept Deputy Prime Minister Nadia Calviño who, despite losing to Paschal Donohoe for the chair of the Eurogroup, has the experience of long years as a Brussels insider to know how to get what she wants.

With them in coalition is the Sumar group led by the current Second Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz. “Yoli” grew up at the same time and in the same town in Galicia as my wife, so I’m not allowed to say anything good about her. Newly arrived foreign correspondents like to invoke her card-carrying membership of one of Spain’s many Communist Parties and, while this is true, it’s more of a cultural thing than an ideology.

In her home town of Ferrol, she is still known as Suso’s daughter in reference to her trade unionist father. She may have been only one year old when her father was imprisoned before Spain’s transition to democracy but he has often spoken to her about how democracy has to be fought for and should never be taken for granted.

Although they are on the same electoral list, she differs from the Podemos party of Pablo Iglesias in one very important way. Díaz’s attitude to the institutions of state is a positive one, that the power of the state when used properly is a good thing. In contrast, the overgrown student activist collective that formed around Pablo Iglesias believes that the state should be smashed. John Carlin put the Podemos problem very well in his most recent column in La Vanguardia: “But Podemos entered into a coalition with the Sánchez government and revealed his immaturity. It was seen that their priority was not so much the happiness of the proletariat as the unhappiness of the bourgeoisie, to which half of Spain belongs and half of Spain aspires to belong.”

Nothing I have ever seen in politics will compare to the decision by Iglesias to walk away from the office of Deputy Prime Minister after just over a year. Having told anyone who would listen that dark forces would prevent him from ever attaining ministerial office, once his party got the votes, he was sworn in. Very quickly, he got bored with the details of actually running a department and left to spend more time with the media.

Podemos did have an impact in government though Irene Montero, a Jacinda Ardern-like figure who has long been in a relationship with Pablo Iglesias. Montero had two legislative priorities, both of which have spectacularly backfired, leading to the near elimination of Podemos in the regional election of May 28, 2023. The “Only Yes is Yes” law was intended to formalise questions of consent in sexual acts.

Laws, however, are interpreted by judges, the majority of whom in Spain are women. When the law went into force, the outcome was not as she intended but instead led to the early release of perpetrators of sexual offences. Montero cried that the judges were misinterpreting the law, and jurists replied that she had been warned that her framing was not specific enough. She refused to budge and instead took to name-calling, eventually causing Pedro Sánchez to intervene and amend the law.

Montero’s second legislative initiative was the trans law, a legal text largely in line with laws enacted in English-speaking countries. Spain, though, is a Latin country where people like to get along, not to look for problems. You can still say “you look great” to someone and not be hauled in front of HR. The Spanish language also has male and female nouns, so attempts at gender neutrality were always going to be more complicated.

Her great mistake was not to bring along with her a generation of feminists who had fought for equality from the time in Spain when a woman could not open a bank account without the permission of her husband. “Irene Montero did not invent feminism” was a common refrain of more traditional feminists who tired of the Podemos antics in the face of the real issues that remain for women on lower incomes. She has been left off the Sumar list and will not repeat as a Minister.

On the centre-right: another Galician

The centre-right Partido Popular (PP) party is led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, formerly the president of Galicia, who is predictably Galician in almost everything he does. He owes his position partly to a series of electoral victories in his conservative region and partly to the need for a safe pair of hands in the face of bitter rivalries in Madrid. He doesn’t burden himself, or anyone else really, with such things as policies.

Yes, there is a manifesto but I very much doubt that he has written any of it or even read it. He appeals to a certain kind of Spanish voter who is distrustful of meritocracy. “If anyone can be president then maybe I could be as well!” He doesn’t miss a funeral and mangles words in speeches. He met his wife Eva Cárdenas in Pontedeume, the Galician village where I spend my summers and, if not elected Prime Minister, I would expect to see him there again this year. She was formerly head of Zara Home and they are seen as very much a political couple.

Asked by the FT how he would achieve his economic goals, the PP leader said he would pull in more foreign investment with “specific fiscal policies to make Spain an attractive country”, including tax incentives for people moving there. He would also look to consolidate Spain’s position as a renewable energy hub.

The nearest that he has to an economic guru is a former McKinsey consultant, leading to a fear that a win for the PP would mean government by consultant as it has been in France and before that in Germany. Smart as these consultants are (many are my former students), Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington wrote in The Big Con that “Whitehall has been infantilised by its reliance on management consultants” and that “management consultants are frequently used by corporate executives or governments to provide a veneer of authority – and a convenient scapegoat – for controversial reforms”. Civil Servants in Spain have long complained about the influence of the Big Four. If the MBB were to take over, there could be a revolt.

”What a great country,” he once Instagramed while on holiday in Killarney.

Finally, we come to the fourth person in this tale of four leaders. Santiago Abascal is the notional head of Vox, the party to the right of the PP. I say notional as according to the former Secretary General Macarena Olona, the real leaders operate in the shadows. “Santi” is not particularly charismatic, which is a problem if you are looking for votes on the far right. He loves Ireland though, or at least he says he does: ”What a great country,” he once Instagramed while on holiday in Killarney.

Vox was founded by former PP members who wanted to shift the axis of political debate from the centre ground to the right. Their supporters consist of three types of people. First you have the ultra-Catholics, those who believe in a ban on abortion from conception and no divorce for anyone apart from themselves. Next you have the anti-globalists. Nothing unusual here. Anti-vax, anti-5G, George Soros etc.

Finally, you have the protest voters, the “a plague on all your houses” types. Many previously voted Podemos but now vote Vox, sure in the knowledge that it will annoy somebody, somewhere. Think Walter, the angry, passionate Vietnam veteran in The Big Lebowski who will pursue any cause, no matter how frivolous, because he’s a man of principle: “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”

Huh, racist much?

The level to which they are racist is disputed. One theory is that being anti-immigration is just a tactic to win votes in low-income neighbourhoods. Vox hasn’t really taken off there despite a big social media push. As with Le Pen in France, a lot of their support comes from young people. The older generation had first-hand experience of fascism and do not wish to repeat the experiment.

John Carlin in La Vanguardia wrote that “the calm in politics, the serene management, is not going well for many millions of Spaniards, it seems. They prefer to enjoy that feeling of moral superiority that indignation gives them. They need raw meat, and that is exactly what Vox gives them.”

Their economic program is absurd, replete with the usual Laffer curve, cut-red-tape nonsense that you find from American MBA-schooled, business-minded young conservatives, and some wealthy entrepreneurs. It’s an economic message that has never resonated among conservative voters in Spain, who regard neoliberalism as too materialistic. In Spain, unlike the US and the UK, there is such a thing as society.  

Feijóo has said he does not want to go into coalition with Vox. He has also said that, well, it depends. Of course he would prefer an overall majority but the PP and Vox have gone into coalition together at the regional level and any notion of Cordon Sanitaire has disappeared with that. Feijóo needs to become Prime Minister as, if he doesn’t, then he will be under threat from Isabel Diaz Ayuso, the president of Madrid.

Ayuso is a Trumpian figure that revels in confrontation and in the defence of liberalism. In a leather jacket, with a Depeche Mode tattoo (“Enjoy the Silence”) and a keen eye for the photo op, she is a formidable campaigner, happy among crowds and very chatty with young and old alike. Like Pedro Sánchez, she lived for a while in Dublin where her CV says she worked for SpinFM. The psephologists say she lacks appeal outside Madrid but there is no doubting her ambition to be Spain’s first female Prime Minister.

Vox in government would be a disaster for Spain. Quite apart from waking those civil war ghosts, they would also wake all the culture war ghosts. No progress is made when the well is poisoned. The progress that Spain has made since joining the EU on January 1, 1986 is a result of the centre left and centre right agreeing to disagree but not threatening to burn it all down.

In particular, the Catalan desire for a secession referendum would again flare up. Pedro Sánchez took it off the political agenda by releasing nine Catalan separatists who were serving long prison sentences for their role in a failed 2017 independence bid. Support for independence is now down to the low levels where it was historically. To get people onto the streets again needs grievance and the bar for that is high while Catalunya remains one of the most prosperous regions in all of Europe.

Risking the breakup of Spain

Within Vox, there is a desire to give it to the renegade Catalans and Basques – as if that would do anything other than send the moderates into the arms of the nationalists. Catalunya outside the EU is unthinkable and there is no path to join the EU without Spain’s consent. Realism has taken over and the focus is on doing the best you can for Catalunya with the considerable autonomy it has. A Vox-inflamed backlash among Catalans towards Madrid would cause considerable risks for the breakup of Spain. If only 50 per cent support secession, then it’s a manageable problem, but if 70 per cent or 80 per cent wanted to leave, then Madrid would have no choice but to agree.

Vox in government would also be a disaster for Spain in Europe as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez holds Spain’s Presidency of the EU Council until the end of this calendar year. Feijóo as Prime Minister would come into a job that he has not prepared for. And that is even before speaking about his lack of experience in Brussels. Ursula von der Leyen was forced to deny a report in El País that she had commented to her cabinet after Feijóo’s visit: “This man has come without ideas”. With the exceptions of Hungary and Italy, whose Prime Ministers have come out publicly in support of Vox, and possibly far-right parties supporting governments in Finland, Sweden, Poland and Latvia, the rest of the EU27 governments will be concerned at the idea of a far-right-backed coalition holding the EU presidency.

The closing days of the campaign have seen Feijóo running away from Sánchez. As the PP are ahead in the polls, Feijóo chose to avoid the TV debate between the four main candidates. In an earlier head-to-head, he had surprised many people by doing better than expected. With a play straight out of the Steve Bannon “flood the zone” playbook, Feijóo chose not to debate but to interrupt and generally talk nonsense. Sánchez appeared unable to deal with him even though he should have known it was coming.

By the time the fact checkers arrived the next day, it was too late. Sánchez has been a good Prime Minister for Spain and will not be short of offers post politics. But he neglected his domestic image and did not give the Spanish media their exclusives. He allowed the PP to create an image of Sanchismo as the destroyer of Spain and did not get out to sell the many achievements he has had as the Presidente del Gobierno de España.  

If pressed to predict a result, I would say a stalemate and elections again in six months. Sánchez gets to complete the EU presidency and the PP will have to struggle with the reality of governing with Vox at a regional level. Spain has a PR system that is not particularly proportional. It favours large parties at the expense of small and medium parties. The allocation of the last seat, depending on whether the minimum threshold is met, will be crucial to the final result.

No doubt fans of Christy Moore’s Viva la Quinta Brigada or Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom will be watching events from afar, concerned that it is 1936 all over again. The entry of Vox, a post-fascist party, into government would certainly be something new but if it happens, it is more likely to blow up in their faces than for their ethos to go from strength to strength.

To a greater or lesser degree, all parties in Spain are agreed on the basics of organising the country around a welfare state, in the heart of the European Union and where the separation of powers still applies. The basic law laid down in the Spanish Constitution of 1978 is not under threat. Expect the fifty year anniversary to be celebrated with much fanfare on October 31, 2028.

Professor Joe Haslam is the Executive Director of the Owners Scaleup Program at IE Business School in Madrid. He is on Twitter as @joehas.