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Ghosts of Past Haunt Struggling Spain

Jamie Dettmer

   The rhetoric would not have been out of place in the Spanish parliament
   in the early 1930s when monarchists and nationalists assailed a Popular
   Front coalition government consisting of Communists, Socialists and
   Catalan separatists in the run-up to Spain's civil war.

   Launching a no-confidence debate midweek on the Socialist-led minority
   government of Pedro Sánchez, Santiago Abascal, leader of the country's
   ultra-nationalist Vox party, attacked what he described as the
   "totalitarian agenda" of "a socialist-communist popular front."'¯

   The echo of the past was purposeful in a debate that was meant to be
   focused on the government's management of the coronavirus pandemic,
   according to Spain's left-leaning El Pais newspaper. The newspaper
   dubbed the speech an "unacceptable regression back to a time of
   obscurantism, intolerance and closed societies."

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