Notes on a Genealogy of the Political Right

It is well known, yet all too often ignored, that the political right in Spain today (Partido Popular) whose founder Fraga was a minister under the Franco Regime, has its origins in the dictatorship. The Transition to democracy itself was hatched in the final years of the Regime and secured a political career for Francoists like Fraga. To a lesser extent however, to my knowledge, has rightwing political thought in Spanish democracy been traced to its historical antecedents. Recently, I’ve been interested in the threads of political theory and neoliberal thought that inform the political right in Spain today (specifically, the ruling Partido Popular). Sketching out this genealogy, my aims is to locate and analyze some of the ideological bases and strategic mechanisms operative in conservative discourse today which have served to justify the right’s self-conceived, “naturalized” right to rule and the mandate from which it legislates. This is a complex subject that deserves several blog entries, among others, on matters such as its recent measures to legislate without dialog (the PP currently has majority rule and, notably, was the only party to vote in favor of the recent austerity measures that inaugurate the dismantling of the Welfare State), as well as its increasing de-legitimization of the tenure of the socialist administrations before it (PSOE). The presumed, natural right to rule and efforts--without dialog--to roll back social reforms passed under the opposition, ultimately deny a space of dissent from which politics must inevitably emerge in democracy. This initial assessment opens up several lines of enquiry about the politics of governance from the conservative right and its hierarchical relationship to “the public," as well as alternative spaces of dissent emerging from the public, independently of the political class. As a point of departure though, I’m interested in some of the undemocratic practices that constitute the stuff of authoritarian rule.

Setting aside these subjects for now, my particular interest is to question how the conservative right conceives of social and political History in terms that, in my initial assessment, both underestimate the radical potential for change and also serve to justify its mandate. This task has led me to wade through a brief sketch or genealogy of conservative political thought in Spain, starting with leading figures in the Partido Popular: the current president Rajoy, former president Aznar, and the party’s founder Fraga, as well as the PP’s ministers and other prominent or lesser-known politicians. Behind the partisan apparatus lies a body of knowledge produced by the political right’s think tanks in democracy—all of which, to my knowledge, have been fused into one association, the Fundación para el Análisis y los Estudios Sociales (FAES), which serves as the ideological backbone of the PP today. The FAES, presided by Aznar and Cospedal, provides the PP and conservative right with an active field of conferences, publications (monographs and a journal), and reports which inform the PP of its threads of action. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, much more Francoist than the public address of its politicians (excerpt below).

In 2001, the FAES absorbed Fundación Cánovas, a think tank founded by Fraga in 1980 during the Transition to democracy. It is no coincidence that the nineteenth-century political thought of Cánovas would serve as the conservative paradigm for the Transition to democracy one century after Cánovas’ lifetime. Cánovas was, after all, one of the founding fathers of the Constitution of 1876 which restored the Bourbon monarchy to power after the military pronouncement that ended the rule of the First Republic. Together with his notorious policies that justified the torture of “anarchist” dissidents, Cánovas is most known for having installed the partisan system known as the “Peaceful Turn” in which the left and right alternated in power. The Canovasian paradigm is one space of political theory that might provide productive to question for its role in rightwing thought today.

During the Transition to democracy in the 1980s, the Fundación Cánovas (FC), like its successor FAES, provided an essential platform of political activity and training for the conservative right before the Partido Popular’s existence (as the Alizanza Popular). The FC counted on support from the Hanns Seidel Foundation in FDR Germany, the political think tank of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria and sister party of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), whose activities predate the creation of the Alianza Popular, as El País reports (12 Nov 1984), and were aimed at providing the rightwing in a young democracy with the tools to recruit voters and train politicians. Former Director of Fundación Cánovas Carlos Robles Piquer writes in his hagiography of the FC’s activities (“Historia de un trabajo bien hecho,” published by FAES), that the Hanns Seidel Foundation provided essential support and education—especially oratory methods for the Spanish right’s politicians—during the Transition to democracy and well into the 1990s. Several announcements for its co-sponsored seminars can be found in the newspaper ABC archives. This collaboration with the FC would lead former president Aznar to bestow the Order of Isabel la Católica to the Hanns Seidel Foundation president in Madrid, Dr. Rainer Glagow, an honor that was returned to Aznar in 1998 when he received the Franz Josef Strauss Award from the Foundation. In the same memory of activities during Fundación Cánovas’ existence, Robles Piquer outlines the FC’s mission during his tenure, which echoes the ideological pillars of National-Catholicism during the Franco Regime, but with a call for united efforts to conserve these values and “renovate” them in democracy:

1º) Mantenerla [Fundación Cánovas] viva y activa, con un papel propio en el mundo nacional de los creadores y defensores de un pensamiento político-social anclado sobre los tres criterios que siguen. 

2º) La defensa de un sentido cristiano claro pero alejado de cualquier beatería y fundado en la creencia de que hay que dar a Dios sólo lo que es de Dios, que no es poco. 

3º) La práctica cotidiana de un profundo amor a España, a su obra histórica, a su pueblo y a su unidad, compatible ésta con su conocida variedad y con la descentralización autonómica, pero también atenta a que ésta no desborde sus propios límites con riesgo de devolvernos al régimen de Taifas que ayudó a la (buena) muerte de Al Andalus, lo que podría ahora, por ejemplo, terminar con la comunidad de pensamientos y expresión que nos confiere esta lengua española que algunos llegan a odiar. 

4º) Una contribución al pensamiento político-social que defiende estos dos principios y el más general de la libertad como principio creador no sólo de riqueza material sino de mucha más riqueza espiritual y cultural, unido a la conservación de cuanto merece ser conservado... y renovado. 

(“Fundación Cánovas del Castillo: historia de un trabajo bien hecho," FAES, pp. 10-11)