The populist narrative differs from history and even from Walter Benjamin’s historical memory, understood as the history of the defeated and forgotten, not only in its explicitly partisan approach and its self-justifying character, but above all in its mobilizing political will.
This is what the story of the former vice-president of the government, Pablo Iglesias, has been about. A trompe l’oeil narrative in which he connects Leninism and populism, destined to flatter the ears of his now mature contemporaries in the communist youth, who in the nineties took up Leninism and the revolution at the wrong time and who today find themselves between nostalgia for the past, pride in the unprecedented presence in the coalition government and dissatisfaction with the meagre results of the much-maligned reformism.
Within the story in which he reserves for himself the role of Greek hero, he highlights the will of the State as a plot thread of the centenary of the PCE, from the October Revolution to the current progressive coalition government, which reveals the resistance of the dark forces and culminates with their immolation for the sake of the continuity of the project. He does not clarify whether to place himself in a new role of ideologist and story builder or, on the contrary, to step out of the spotlight for the time being and perhaps return later with more strength.
The core of the argument is the continuity of the will of the State of the communists, as a euphemism for revolution and the seizure of power from Lenin and the communist movement, to the indignation led by Pablo Iglesias and the presence of communists in the coalition government with Podemos, passing through the Popular Front in the last phase of the Second Spanish Republic.
A will to State in the manner of a transcript of the Nietzschean will to power, reflected first in the revolutionary seizure of power and now in the seizure of power by assault, then in the sorpasso of the PSOE in the left, finally frustrated, whose last meaning is now reduced to the participation in the coalition Government. The will of the State became, with the landing in reality, a mere will to govern.
For this reason, the Second Republic, the long and hard anti-Francoist resistance and finally the pact for freedom do not interest him in his narration, nor does a Transition that he sees as partial and bittersweet, to put it mildly.
In the story he consciously avoids what is most important and which signifies the change of paradigm and the singular identity of the PCE within the communist parties: the 1956 National Reconciliation proposal built in the clandestine struggle and in the prisons of the anti-Francoist struggle, as well as the awareness against fascism and by extension against any form of totalitarianism, including that of the actually existing communist regimes, with the logical culmination of a Copernican turn from revolution to reform, from the assault on power to the defence of parliamentary democracy and, in short, with the new Eurocommunist strategy, not only as a democratic path to socialism, but as the essence of a socialism that can only be democratic. Pablo Iglesias, however, ignores this and thus hides much of our history and the true identity of the PCE and the PCE within the IU. The problem is that this PCE and this IU are no good for a populist project.
Again, as has been traditional since the very origin of Podemos, the speaker also undervalues and misrepresents the Democratic Transition with the discourse of its partial and catastrophic character (change everything so that everything remains) and as a consequence its decadence, little less than inevitable, in the democracy of the imperfect bipartisanship in a continuist alliance with the nationalists, including the class unions CCOO and UGT as part of the aforementioned power bloc.
The clichéd leftist discourse of betrayal and the submissive left of the Transition, in which the PCE would make the harakiri by committing itself to the democratic game with the insurmountable limit of the veto to its presence in the State Government. A betrayal of the will of the State. In short, it is a rejection of the complexity required by the idea of the will of State-Power that only germinates in simplification. Democracy is rejected as a complex idea. The contradiction comes when the trade unions UGT and CCOO are invited to the party of the PCE and close ranks with them to defend the conquests, always partial and insufficient, of every coalition government and even of every democratic government.
Nor is it a coincidence that it ignores the strategic project of Izquierda Unida and its contribution to Spanish democracy, fundamentally in the autonomous and local governments and in the collaboration or opposition to successive governments. Struggle and government that forms an inseparable part, first of the project of the PCE and then of the IU and that Julio Anguita develops with his experience. municipal as the will of government. Something very different from the will of the state. IU was a second democratic immersion of the PCE after the first one produced by Eurocommunism.
In this sense, its situation in Spain perhaps has more to do with the IU’s inability to take advantage of the possibility of opening up to broad sectors of the left and the distancing of the CCOO and UGT, something that we should meditate on why it happened. IU refused to exhaust the logic of its own foundation and the dichotomous and Manichean language that Iglesias deploys today in the party of the PCE, I must admit that it began to be dominant in that, my dear IU.
As a consequence of the above, Pablo Iglesias presents himself as the doer who breaks with the subordination and puts an end to the exclusion of the communists in the State Government, when on the contrary the problem has been general in Europe in the context of the cold war and as a consequence of the scarce electoral support and the existence of the replacement of the nationalists so that we have been able to be part of coalition governments like the current one. Likewise, he presents himself as the trump card of the new alternative alliance with EH Bildu and ERC, as opposed to the attempt to recompose reformism with the centre of Ciudadanos, without of course stopping to analyse it in terms of its costs and results. What is the will of the state of these two political forces? Certainly, and quite legitimately, not that of a common State for the whole of Spain. Therefore, an ideological alliance with these two lefts harbours a contradiction that they do not want to make explicit. This does not prevent cooperative and political alliances that are an indispensable part of democracy. It is the leftist myth that Pablo Iglesias wants to promote by symbolically using these two political forces to accentuate his revolutionary aesthetics. More populist ammunition that a political system without centripetal and moderating force needs.
Nor does it analyse the complexity of the dark forces of the deep state, but rather takes credit for bringing them to light thanks to its presence in the government and its alliance with the pro-independence parties, without taking into account their previous existence and above all their strengthening as a consequence of the polarisation that populism entails, beyond the deficits of the transition, now monopolised by the ultra-right. That is why the left must put the democratic will before the will of the Power-State because the latter does not harbour the concept of plurality.
At the end of his speech, he explained his departure from the Vice-Presidency of the Government.rno as a necessary sacrifice as a result of the reaction of the deep state to his policy of alliances with independentism as an alternative to continuism, without clarifying the contradiction implied by his claim of the will of the state and not even the most reformist will to govern, with his ephemeral presence and unexpected departure from the government for the lost battle in Madrid. Something very little Leninist and very little responsible, on the other hand.
In short, Pablo Iglesias appears before you and wants to continue being the ideologue of Unidas Podemos and of the radical left, who from outside the Government reveals to us the strategy to follow and the more than obvious resistances of the deep State, so that others will be the ones to manage reality and its contradictions. Because the results of the will of government and of concrete management will always be unsatisfactory. A matter of women and men, more than of heroes and gods.
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