Politicians and an election campaign is the stuff Petrie dishes were invented for. Like diligent laboratory slogs, we heartless strategists zoom in on the colors of failure. Today, our subject is Spain's Partido Popular destined to lose handily today's Presidential election despite running against an ineffective Rodríguez Zapatero government.
Rodrígeuz Zapatero and the ruling PSOE was vulnerable for: 1) running a zigzag economic policy that now simply looks ridiculous as the economy tanks; 2) inventing an incoherent immigration policy that is coming part with rising unemployment; 3) demonstrating that it was thoroughly informed and confused in its failed negotiations with ETA, culminating in a terrorist attack just days before the elections; 4) nuzzling up to Chavez and Castro and getting dumped on by Merkel and Zarkozy; etc., etc. During four years, PSOE proposed and undid policy after policy, passed into law programs it could not fund, and in general demostrated a level of incompetenence that ought to send a ruling party into exile.
And yet, PP's candidate, Mariano Rajoy, was incapable of making inroads on a single issue. On the economy he had no real proposals despite growing inflation and unemployment. On the negotiations with ETA, PP whined and protested to the point that it seemed that they were undermining a government when the government was screwing up all on its own.
PP did an ever worse job with regional national demands. For decades, PP has presented a vision of Spain as a social club for Spanish speakers. This was always a bad strategy. Which leads to a good question: Why would PP pursue a losing strategy year after year?
A story might help to provide an answer. Three and a half years ago, not long after PP lost the last elections by making a mess of its response to the horrifying terrorist attack of March 11th, I taught a strategy class to members of Spain National and Madrid Autonomous Community Parliaments. It gave me a chance to challenge the strategy skills of politicians from PP, PSOE and Izquierda Unida.
During one class break, I suggested to several PP class participants that they propose an education bill offering parents the opportunity to send their kids to school in any of the four national languages anywhere in Spain. I told them to put on their strategists' hats and ask themselves, "How many parents will sign up their kids for the Madrid Ikastola?" I said, "Do what I say and you will look like the avatars of tolerance while you fight back against the nationalists." I said, "This is a no-brainer for you guys."
My idea was rejected out of hand. And so the idea sat dormant until this election season when PSOE, smelling an opportunity, came forward in Andalucia with their own language proposal. As befits PSOE, the plan was a mess, with the utopian goal of trilingual Andalusians conversing in Spanish, English and `pidgin Catalan without spending money to do it. PP, of course, rejected the idea as "insane".
But this seemed to open up saner minds, so that in the last minute of the campaign, the President of the Autonomous Community of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre, figured this out and offered Catalan schooling in Madrid. Way too little, and way too late. PP had already secured its rightful place with the electorate as the anti-Basque and anti-Catalan party.
[I might add here that Aguirre was the only candidate PP could have fielded with a chance to defeat Rodríguez Zapatero.]
In large part, PP will lose this election due to its failed strategy for managing regional nationalism. PP should have realized that following the devolution of power to the local autonomous governments, the only real issue left is language. This was, of course, always the most emotionally charged issue. Culture, as we know, is rooted in language and religion.
Accordingly, PP loyalists do everything they can to defend the Spanish language. But it does so by fighting against the use of the minority languages and position themselves as the big ugly oppressor. This is as stupid as telling a teenage child to listen to Mom and Dad and not his friends. The right strategy, as we know now, was cooptation via offering the regional nationalists the opportunity to use their languages in the rest of Spain.
PP's strategic inability to reflect and change is evidenced in its other failures as well. On immigration, PP did almost as bad as it has on regional nationalism. Spain's immigration mess was an opportunity PP could not afford to flub, but as they had never come to terms with the failures of the Aznar government, they were stuck defending old failed policies. As a result, they came off as racists, when in fact their proposals were similar, or even less restrictive, than those proposed by many other European governments.
This is not to say that getting the strategy on immigration is easy. PP needed to demonstrate that they had learned from the mistakes made during their eight years in power. The had to make the case that as the first Spanish government to face immigration that had to go up the learning curve ... and it so doing that they had turned a dangerous corner on immigration only to have PSOE then drive the country off the cliff. Instead, once again, just as they had on Iraq and the terrorist attacks of March 11th, PP decided to stand its ground. This was bad strategy.
And so on the economy, on regional nationalism and on immigration, PP shot itself it the foot. But even after getting all this wrong, they might still have won the elections if they had been able to field a solid candidate.
However, Mr. Rajoy is a terrible candidate. He is an awful public speaker. He mumbles and modulates his voice in a way that makes the trivial important and the important incomprehensible. Numbers seem beyond him; each time he inserts a statistic he stumbles around looking for an idea to which he can connect the number. On occasion, he projects passion and interest, but this is precisely when he most looses connection with his arguments. I have been told that in private Mr. Rajoy is intelligent and warm. Unfortunately, In public, he is clumsy, cloying and needy. If possible, he is an even worse candidate than John Kerry.
After such virulent criticism of Mr. Rajoy, I will be accused of being a Rodríguez Zapatero supporter. This is not true, though I am a social democrat. In this election, we are faced sadly with a choice between an incompetent party in power and an opposition party with outdated ideas, no discernable program, and a bad candidate.
Among Spaniards with an interest in politics, the read on the four years of the Rodríguez Zapatero government is that the best thing that happened was that mostly nothing happened. The standard line is the following: Lame schemes were proposed and then shot down by the Minister of Economy, Pedro Solbes, or when they were passed into law there was no money to fund them.
Unfortunately, benign confusion will no longer do. Rising unemployment and inflation will be accompanied by rising crime and social unrest. We face hard times. Hopefully, the Zapatero Rodríguez government will awaken from its dogmatic slumber and behave like a professional government and not just a bunch of weekend aviation enthusiasts proud of having gotten their model airplane off the ground. We have run into foul weather and need a steady hand.
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