The vanishing exception: republican and reactionary specters of populism in rural Spain

ABSTRACT

In contrast to the dominant European tendency, the 2008 economic crisis and the ensuing austerity in Spain led to the emergence of left populist movements that have kept authoritarian populism at bay. However, those progressive movements have made few inroads in the countryside, potentially ceding this ground to reactionary politics. But if the specter of reaction haunts the countryside, I also suggest that this specter coexists with emancipatory possibilities. To examine these, I discuss a rural protest movement against extractive practices that developed in the early 2000s. This movement, I argue, provides valuable insight into how feelings of abandonment can be given a class-conscious, popular democratic expression.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian populism
• left-wing populism
• Catalonia
• Podemos
• slow dispossession

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Hunt Fellowship, Gr. 8732) and to the Humanities Institute and the Baldy Center Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo-SUNY for supporting parts of the research on which this paper is based. Part of this paper was written while enjoying a visiting professorship (2018–19) in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Barcelona; I am grateful to the colleagues in Barcelona for their warm welcome and for providing a collegial and friendly atmosphere. I also thank three anonymous reviewers from the Journal of Peasant Studies, its editor Jun Borras, as well as Gavin Smith and Marion Werner, for their insightful comments on this manuscript. Finally, I thank the colleagues from the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) group for initiating research on authoritarian populism and the rural world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Jaume Franquesa http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8416-2792

Notes

1 The bulk of this fieldwork was carried out between 2010 and 2014, totaling 11 months. Research was aimed at building an ethnographically situated history of how Southern Catalans have related with energy facilities from the 1960s to the present. Fieldwork included interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis in local archives. I interviewed local mayors and administration officials, activists, peasant leaders, wind farm developers, environmentalist leaders, wine producers, nuclear workers and landowners affected by energy infrastructure. Among other activities, participant observation involved attending marches, demonstrations and activist meetings, visiting electricity-producing facilities, wine cellars and farming cooperatives, and accompanying farmers in their daily routines, as well as participating in the rich festive calendar of the region.

2 Sobiranisme includes, but cannot be reduced to nor should it be confused with independentisme (the political movement aiming to achieve the secession of Catalonia from Spain). Sobiranisme is larger, broader and more plural than independentisme, both in its position towards the political status of Catalonia and in the range of issues in its agenda. On the one hand, not all sobiranistes are independentistes, that is to say, not all those political actors and forces that claim that Catalans have the right to hold an independence vote are in favor of Catalan independence. On the other hand, whereas independentisme tends to restrict political debate to discussing the path towards Catalan independence, sobiranisme insists that this discussion needs to be placed within a broader emancipatory project putting social and economic demands center stage.

3 For opposite views on the emancipatory, transformative potential of left-wing populism, see Fassin (2017) and Mouffe (2018).

4 This dialectic can be extended back to the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, albeit with a quicker turnover: ‘The history of Spain between 1808 and 1874 is a succession of attempts to advance through the democratic path … which were ultimately frustrated by as many blowbacks … with a balance of 15 years of democratizing attempts against 66 of counterrevolution’ (Fontana 2007, 433).

5 Or, in Brais Fernández's formulation, ‘why Galician, Basque and … Catalan independentists are – together with the “Reds” – the enemies par excellence which the Spanish Right's project is built around’ (Fernández 2018).

6 ‘Whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals … [so that] the efforts of the traditional classes … prevent the formation of collective will’ (Gramsci 1971, 115). Thus, popular projects are sidelined and remain incomplete.

7 As I finish the revisions to this article, on 2 December 2018, Vox has obtained 11% of the vote in the Andalusian election, thus entering a (regional) parliament for the first time ever and therefore confirming beyond any doubt that the exception is over.

8 The Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores, allied with the left sectors of both movements, is the one very notable exception to the countryside's post-crisis political invisibility.

9 For a synthesis of the transformations of Spanish agriculture and their effects on rural land and territories since the turn of the century, see Arnalte, Moreno, and Ortiz (2013) and Soler and Fernández (2015).

10 On the concept of ground rent and rent capture, see the classic work of Smith (1990) and the recent contribution of Andreucci et al. (2017).

11 Between 1995 and 2008, the average price of agricultural land more than doubled – from 5200 to 11,010 euros per hectare (Soler and Fernández 2015, 88–93).

12 For recent installments on this debate, see Bernstein (2018), van der Ploeg (2018) and White (2018).

13 This semantic extension runs in parallel to the declining importance of agriculture in the area, and is commensurate with the Southern Revolt's above-mentioned shift from strictly agrarian to rural concerns.

Additional information

Funding

I am grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Hunt Fellowship, Gr. 8732) and to the Humanities Institute and the Baldy Center Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo-SUNY for supporting parts of the research on which this paper is based.

Notes on contributors

Jaume Franquesa

Jaume Franquesa (PhD University of Barcelona, 2006) is associate professor of anthropology at the University at Buffalo (The State University of New York). His research focuses on the relationship between the commodification of resources, the making of local livelihoods and forms of political mobilization. He is the author of Urbanismo neoliberal, negocio inmobiliario y vida vecinal (Icaria, 2013) and Power struggles: Dignity, value, and the renewable energy frontier in Spain (Indiana University Press, 2018).