Carlos Luján / Europa Press
On December 6, the 46th anniversary of the Spanish Constitution will be commemorated. Although the politicians in power will come out to highlight its validity and vitality, it is more realistic to admit that the events of the last decade have turned this document into a useless constitution. Today, the Constitution is not useful to guarantee the effective exercise of public powers. In this context, Sumar’s commitment to the coalition government as functional to democratize society through progressive changes, has been inverted and transformed into a strategy that, in practice, only leads to the marginalization of the political space to the left of the PSOE. and the advance of authoritarian tendencies. I explain this thesis.
A Constitution is the assumption and instrument of political action and, therefore, one of its objectives is to organize public powers in order to make the State an effective unit of power and policy implementation. Effective does not mean in favor of the majorities, but simply useful to meet the political objectives of the governing party. Policies are made according to purposes.
He constitutional regime of 78 was designed to generate stability and efficiency in close correlation with a bipartisan model. It is not the Constitution that creates the two-party system, but the two-party system that creates the 1978 Constitution. This is not an abstract normativity, but rather it was the concrete normative structure of a political and social reality in which the systematization of a system of bipartisan power relations was considered the best option for a distribution of power between the main actors of the transition, as well as to ensure the governability and stable reproduction of the 78 regime. The objective to be achieved acted as a condition for a constitutional design designed to be effective within a two-party operating system. And in fact, this was a model that operated successfully for the regime and its agents until 2015.
From then on, 15-M, the Procés and information and communication technologies have broken the bipartisan logic. Revolts, while they may fail in the short story, often cause changes in the long story that slowly emerge over time and alter the political and social dynamics of a country. The Constitution of ’78 represents a systematization of a certain type of political power relations that no longer exists.
The 15-M implied a quantitative change in the party system. The old model with only two large state parties and where the other small state parties had zero capacity to put pressure on the Government, is now replaced by one again where new intermediate political forces necessary to govern appear. The Process implies a qualitative change which means that the Catalan, Basque and Galician parties that must act as a hinge in Spain are no longer conservative nationalists of order concerned with guaranteeing the stability of the State (CiU and PNV), but rather sovereignist forces whose nature has mutated from loyal partners in governance to that of extractivist parties that negotiate compensation for each specific support to show as a trophy in their territory. And, as for ICT, the power of social networks and the indifference of citizens to any form of political participation other than that offered by digital communities, allows the emergence of new leaders and parties without any territorial structure that achieve parliamentary representation, further distorting the game of majorities and minorities.
This new political scenario, which is here to stay, has generated a gap between constitutional design and political-social reality that prevents the normal exercise of the fundamental functions of the State: the executive, the legislative and the judicial.
The impossibility of governing alone and the need for coalition Executives makes it difficult to process bills that receive resistance within the government coalition. The difficulty of creating parliamentary majorities makes the legislative power slow, lacking the capacity for action and inefficient to make the legislative link between the mechanism for receiving citizen demands and the mechanism for issuing solutions to the former work. And with regard to the judicial power, the increase in parliamentary interdependencies, which gives greater pressure capacity to the intermediate parties, has sharpened, to extreme limits, the activism of conservative judges and courts hindering the implementation of laws approved and break the direct relationship between government action and results.
All of this makes the political-constitutional system useless, since, regardless of whether the PSOE or the PP holds the presidency of the government, today it is incapable of guaranteeing the effective exercise of public powers. And if we consider that one of the main needs of people in society is to be governed, to be governed well if they are lucky, but whatever the case, to be governed, when they do not receive such governance, the consequence is frustration and disaffection. towards traditional political spaces and actors. The State gains existence and meaning through its functions and when these stop operating it loses its reason for being, which is reflected in a clear constitutional crisis and citizen boredom.
In this context of a useless Constitution, the left can occupy two positions with different consequences. One is to continue positioning itself as a government party subordinate to the PSOE within an ineffective constitutional system that does not allow politics. This corners it to electoral marginality and clears the field for the extreme right that capitalizes on the dissatisfaction of the masses, tired of a dysfunctional institutional system to which the former is assimilated. The other is to leave the government to configure a new plural and popular-based political project, capable of channeling social frustration through citizen mobilization around a discourse focused on social rights and the constituent process, thus closing the potential field of expansion. of the extreme right among the popular classes.
This is why, as I stated at the beginning, in the present context of a useless Constitution, Sumar’s strategy of opting for coalition governments does not serve to democratize the country by adapting the laws to popular demands, but, conversely, It is a strategy that can only lead to the marginalization of the political space to the left of the PSOE and the advance of neo-fascism.
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