The
Galliard of Don John of
by Professor Plinio Corrêa de
Oliveira (*)
To see, judge and act, according to St. Thomas
Aquinas, is the right order of human action. Let us begin, then, by
"seeing" the results of the recent Spanish elections.
Let us see things exactly as they happened. I take the
figures from the large, prestigious and moderate
a) In the previous Cortes
the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) held 121 seats. It now holds 201, a
net gain of 80 seats; b) The Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), with 168
seats, formerly outnumbered the socialists. It lost 156 seats and is now
reduced to only 12. This was a spectacular defeat for centrism.
c) The Communist Party held 23 seats. Now it has only
5. Since the party's votes were already so few, the loss of 18 seats is really
heavy. d) The rightist Popular Alliance (AP) was the party that gained the
most, jumping from a mere 9 representatives to 106. The gain was 97 seats —
more than 1000 percent.
I abstain from analyzing the vote for some small
factions that do not change the picture.
Let us go on to "judge:" a) The socialist vote gave the PSOE the majority: 201 out of
350 seats. This entitles it to have the new cabinet chosen from its ranks. When
this article comes out, King Juan Carlos — a quintessential centrist, and therefore
a veiled but active sympathizer of socialism — will probably be in delicious
negotiations with majority leader Felipe Gonzalez; b) The
rightist opposition, with an aura of radiant dynamism as the party which made
the most progress in the elections, can create serious obstacles for the
government's majority. But I do not see how it can stably prevent the PSOE from
having wide-ranging socialist legislation approved.
In short, the advantage the socialists gained with
their increase of seats is offset by the harm they have suffered from the loss
of prestige caused by the fact that the right grew more than they did.
Finally, let us go on to "act." From our
easy chairs as Brazilian spectators, to act is to root for one of the
contenders, which is important for us since rooting is one of our favorite
activities. But it is also so because our rooting regarding foreign affairs
conditions considerably our attitudes toward domestic affairs.
So let us go on to our rooting: What is most likely to
happen?
As we have seen, the most important thing that happened
was, in essence, the disbanding of the center, which split into two parts. One
slid to the left and the other to the right. Of the formerly omnipotent center,
nothing but a small handful of ashes was left. The significance of this fact
goes beyond a mere redistribution of seats in the Parliament. It indicates a
change on a most profound level of the Spanish psychology, which tends toward Sancho Panza when centrist,
toward Don Quixote when leftist (what was the Pasionaria
but a sinister "Quixota" of the left?), or
toward Lepanto, symbolized by Don John of Austria, the heroic victor of that
celebrated naval battle (with whom I by no means compare, nor did the cream of
the Spanish right ever compare, Francisco Franco Bahamonde).
Now, the Spaniards who went from the center to the
left or to the right were not exactly devotees of Sancho
Panza. Wearied with tension in 1977 and 1979, when
they voted for the center, they simply wanted a relaxation of tensions. And
basically they still do. But when they found out that the relaxed ambience imposed
on them by Adolfo Suarez and subsequently by Calvo Sotelo was the peace of Sancho Panza in the
So they began to look for relief elsewhere. Following
instinctive preferences, some went to the left, others to the right. But,
whether in the PSOE or the AP, they are linked across party borders by
invisible but strong temperamental ties and continue to constitute one
psychological bloc. If the centrists who fled from Sancho
Panza to the PSOE were to be asked to support a
decidedly socialist program, they would switch from the PSOE to the AP.
Likewise, if the AP were in power and tried to carry out a very rightist program, its centrists would change over to the PSOE.
Now, the PSOE happens to be the party in power. It is
the one that must carry out a program, and therefore the one which stands to
lose its ex-centrists to the AP. If in order to preserve the adhesion of the
neophytes who want a relaxation of tensions the PSOE fails to carry out its
program, another unavoidable misfortune seems to await it: a stoning from its
frustrated Quixotic majority.
Therefore, it is easy to see why the ABC cartoon reproduced here pictures the
majority party so fatigued and perplexed.
The rightists are left with the joys of opposition,
the salty Spanish delight of being "against." One perceives that the
"pro-relaxationists" who left the center
for the AP had, crackling deep down beneath their longings for a relaxation of
tensions, a renewed gusto for bullfights and castanets. I once read that
when Don John of
But now another question arises. Everything was done
to innoculate post-Yalta
A subtle, dazzling subject... irritating to some. We
leave it for another day. Perhaps.
(*)
“Folha de S. Paulo”,