The Elementary Articles—#28 (May 2023)
A Hungarian TV debut, Spain's local and regional election results, and my latest writing binge.
Dear reader,
Welcome to another edition of The Elementary Articles, where I get to share with you my latest work laced with the odd nugget of personal news. For starters, please accept my apologies for the hiatus in this newsletter's cadence. The past two months have seen me focus on writing over media engagements, yielding less in the latter front to update you on. The number of pieces and podcasts listed here is correspondingly larger than usual.
You may have noticed that recent editions of this newsletter have featured important changes, and those changes will continue in the near-future. My attempt to keep you abreast of my work in the least time-consuming way is a constant work in progress. Some monthly editions may carry a lot of content, others less so—but all will seek to optimize the time you spend reading.
As always, I look forward to your feedback by replying below or on Twitter (@JorgeGGallarza). Happy reading!
[TV] Unpacking Spain's election results on Hír TV
Editor's note—On Tuesday, May 31st, I went live on Napi Aktuális, the nightly news programme over at Hír TV, one of Hungary's largest TV stations. I was there to unpack Sunday's local and regional election results in Spain, which saw a right-wing wave topple the ruling socialists in a number of key regions and localities. The interview (linked above) is conducted in Hungarian (the presenter's questions) and English (my answers), but the segment has been posted entirely in Hungarian. For a better sense of what I said, you can read the English version of a piece I wrote for Magyar Nemzet below.
[Op-ed] The death throes of Spanish socialism
Editor's note—The following op-ed ran in Hungarian on Magyar Nemzet, Hungary's largest conservative daily, on Tuesday, May 30th. It covers Spain's local and regional election results from Sunday also. The following is the original English version of the piece.
The coalition of PM Pedro Sánchez suffered a thumping defeat at Sunday’s local and regional race.
Spaniards went to bed Sunday night ruled by Europe’s leftmost coalition. Upon a 2018 motion of no confidence that successfully toppled then-PM Mariano Rajoy of the right-of-center Partido Popular (PP) on charges of connivence with corruption, the socialist PSOE party won a plurality of votes at the following year’s snap election, though not a majority. PSOE’s leader, Pedro Sánchez, stood athwart his party’s constitutionalist tradition by propelling himself to power on the strength of Spain’s most left-wing, least constitutionalist and most intricate coalition ever. The coalition rested either on the outward support or the willful abstention of a motley of leftist and left-regionalist parties, including PODEMOS, the successor party to the terror group ETA (EH Bildu) and the Catalan parties that took part in and abetted the region’s illegal 2017 referendum on independence. Over its four-year term, the government has delivered a progressive wish-list of woke identitarianism, eco-social engineering, Covid-19 lockdowns, and divisive historical revisionism.
Voters have had enough of this radical agenda. At yesterday’s local and regional elections, the PP flipped four of the 12 regions that went to the polls (Comunidad Valenciana, Aragón, Baleares, and La Rioja), with other traditionally socialist strongholds, such as Andalucía, having already switched their colors in recent snap races. The PSOE will only credibly hold onto two of the regions it ruled: Asturias and Extremadura. The other three regions in which it remains the largest party have delivered that result for non-extrapolatable reasons. In Castilla-la-Mancha, where hopes of a flip ran high, PSOE baron Emiliano G. Page ran a campaign highly critical of his party’s leadership. In Navarra, PSOE can only govern with the support of EH Bildu, which would make for even worse optics than nationally. PODEMOS has been all but wiped out. Results at the local level are similarly dire for the left. PSOE has lost 15 of the 22 provincial capitals it ruled. The thumping was so heavy that Pedro Sánchez has called a snap election for July 23rd, five months earlier than scheduled.
Some of these results bear unpacking. Along with vindicating the leadership of the PP’s Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, the right-wing end of the spectrum has also grown on the strength of Vox, a party the ruling coalition has typecast as a dangerous form of national-populism but which also attracts the support of plainly liberal-conservative voters who see the two major parties as different shades of the same social-democratic agenda. Vox doubled its votes relative to 2019, surpassed the one million votes mark, and trebled its number of local councilors. It will prove decisive in ousting PSOE from office in several of the aforementioned regions where PP came first but fell short of an absolute majority. The only region where PP will be able to govern on its own is Madrid, where the liberal firebrand Isabel Díaz Ayuso has campaigned markedly to the right of the national party, such as by managing Covid-19 with a light touch, speaking out against the “social-communist” government (a Vox talking point) and calling for the illegalization of EH Bildu.
Leading newspaper El Mundo minced no words in its editorial diagnosing Sánchez’s defeat: “never before had a Spanish government had so little territorial power nor governed the regions for fewer citizens”. The question is how the tectonic plaques will move in the lead-up to July’s national vote. Just as in said regions and localities, the chances that either PP or Vox will win an absolute majority at the national level are incredibly slim, given the never-more fractious electoral landscape. The path forward to oust Sánchez from office therefore runs through a PP-Vox coalition, and these regions and cities where the two will run affairs jointly will prove a laboratory of what’s possible—and what isn’t—nationally. Granted, some major differences exist between the two. PP is a Europhile, globalist party whilst Vox is markedly sovereignist and even Eurosceptic. The former believes in some degree of gender equality, whilst the latter rejects the premise altogether. There are more differences, but there are also commonalities. Not least putting an end to a nightmare four years
Recent writings (in chronological order)
When Debating Israel, Avoid Maximalism, Newsweek.
Europe's China Dilemma, The European Conservative.
Up From Fusionism (Review of Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery), The European Conservative [print].
The Shield and the Olive Branch, The European Conservative.
The Whig View of Spanish History (Review of Gilles Tremlett's España), The Critic.
Jewer Than Thou (Review of Emily Tamkin's Bad Jews), Law & Liberty.
Democracy, Really (Review of Shadi Hamid's The Problem of Democracy), The American Conservative.
Shining Cities and Sovereign Nations, The European Conservative.
Choosing Hate, The Critic.
Up From Race (Review of Kenan Malik's Not So Black and White), Law & Liberty.
Empire's Moral Ledger (Review of Nigel Biggar's Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning), The European Conservative.
UnDecencyPod, your favorite euro-realist podcast
Here’s the usual line-up of Uncommon Decency’s recent episodes. Please remember you can contribute to the show by donating through our Patreon page. Any help will be much appreciated!
83. Going East: Europe's New Center of Gravity, with Jana Puglierin & Timothy Garton Ash: While the geographic center of the EU is apparently in a small Bavarian field, its political center is harder to pin down. Historically, it was probably somewhere between France and Germany, but with the war in Ukraine, this center has seemingly moved East. Warsaw was not too long ago under considerable pressure from Brussels over rule-of-law skirmishes. Now, Poland and Lithuania are reaping the political benefits of their unambiguous support to Ukraine and their long-established hawkish stance on Russia. In a sign of this evolution Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki last weekend was not afraid to lambast Germany for being “co-responsible for the mess on the energy market” and urged Berlin to step up its support for Kiev. We wanted to map this shift in European politics and stress-test whether this pivot is noise or substance. We are joined by Jana Puglierin, the head of European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in Berlin and a returnee to the show. On the other side of the line, we are joined by Timothy Garton Ash, a historian of contemporary Europe who just published Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (2023), a part-memoir based on his decades of experience traveling across Europe. This week our Patreons will get to listen to Timothy and Jana mapping out the nuances of Central and Eastern European politics, between Poland and Hungary, or Romania and Bulgaria.
84. 2023: French Revolution? with Nicholas Vinocur & Cole Strangler: "Is it a revolt? No sire, it's a revolution". While this famous exchange is attributed to Louis the XVIth and the Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, odds are that French President Macron has had similar conversations with his aides in the past few weeks. In an attempt to balance the books of France's pensions regime, Macron’s party—Renaissance—filed a bill to increase the legal retirement age from 62 to 64. Without a formal majority in Parliament, he needed the support of the center right, but given the overwhelming opposition to the bill across the electorate, Macron decided to use a constitutional trump card to force through the bill without a vote. This triggered a no confidence vote which was only 9 votes short of toppling Macron's PM, Élisabeth Borne, and her government. In the meantime, millions have taken to the streets or went on strike to oppose the bill. While these have been largely peaceful, some have turned violent, with brutal street fights breaking out between police officers and antifa groups. This week, we try to take stock of this chaos with Nicholas Vinocur from POLITICO and Cole Strangler, a Paris-based freelancer. Bear in mind we won’t be releasing an episode next week, and expect us to be back the week after that. Enjoy your Easter break!
85. The European Union and the Habsburg Myth, with Helen Thompson & Caroline de Gruyter: “I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace”. We begin with this quote from Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday (1942) for two reasons. First, because it is a wonderful book that beautifully describes this powerful sense of loss—do give it a read. But more importantly, because in this episode we will challenge the idea that the Empire of the Habsburgs vanished “without trace”. In fact, its legacy remains incredibly alive in Central Europe specifically, and across Europe more generally. Some might see in the European Union (EU) an offspring of the buried liberal empire. So today we will explore what we owe to the Habsburgs and weave that parallel between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the EU. Joining us in this time capsule of an episode, we have Caroline de Gruyter, a German journalist of all things Brussels, and author of “Monde d’hier, monde de demain” which covers exactly today’s topic—go give it a read if you want to dig in further. On the other side of the line we have former Talking Politics podcast star and Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, Helen Thompson. She recently published “Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century”, a top-rated account on the three crises rocking western democracies in the 2020s. As usual, the full conversation will be available only to our Patreon subscribers.
86. The Ghost of Franco & Spain's Memory Wars, with Michael Reid & Nigel Townson: “If only mine were the last drop of Spanish blood to be spilled in civil strife. God willing, may the Spanish people at peace, so replete with extraordinary virtue, at last find homeland, bread and justice”. Who among today’s Spaniards could possibly disown this quote? The man who uttered in November 1936 shortly before being shot by firing squad, in whose tombstone the epitaph is inscribed, is José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The current left-wing government of Spain has different plans for his bodily remains. As part of its so-called law of democratic memory, approved last summer, Primo de Rivera will be disinterred this week from his tomb at what used to be called the Valley of the Fallen—renamed Valle de Cuelgamuros by the same bill—incinerated, and his ashes will be relocated to the San Isidro monastery in Madrid. So what does the government of Pedro Sánchez fault Primo de Rivera for? Although he ended his life on the aforecited conciliatory note—and even though he lived through only six months of the civil war from prison before being executed by the Second Republic, which viewed him as a threat—Primo de Rivera remains a standard-bearer of 20th century Spanish fascism, someone historians see as having laid the idealogical groundwork for Franco, who went on to rule for 40 years upon winning the Civil War. He is the latest target of a sweeping effort, unfolding since the previous socialist government in the late 2000s, to settle the scores of these tumultuous decades of Spain’s history. These bills do various things. They rename streets and monuments. By setting up DNA banks, they enable families to trace, find and give a proper burial to Republican victims of Francoist repression buried in mass graves. And lastly, they reframe the way History is taught, depicting the Second Republic (1931-1939) as the unimpeachable defender of freedom and democracy against Franco’s fascist villains. This week, we will navigate this treacherous topic by inquiring about Franco’s exact place in Spain’s public consciousness, exploring the demographics of this issue, and questioning whether Spain’s history can be so neatly framed as a black-or-white story of good versus evil. We are joined by two distinguished hispanists. On one side of the line, Michael Reid, a longtime regular at The Economist and the author most recently of Spain: The Trials and Tribulations of a Modern European Country (2023), with Yale University Press. On the other side of the line we have with us Nigel Townson, a professor of History at Complutense University in Madrid.
87. Macron in China, Meloni Magic—Decency Deep Dive [BONUS]: It's debate season on Uncommon Decency. This week we evaluated President Macron's visit to China, and the premiership of Giorgia Meloni. As well as what stood out to us from the first part of this year. Enjoy!
88. The Rise (and Fall?) of Erdogan, with Ryan Gingeras & Birol Baskan: In the mid-1990s, the mayor of Istanbul was quoted saying: “democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off”. That mayor is now president and his critics fear he believes Turkey has reached its democratic destination. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise to power, his consolidation of it, and his ability to shape world events makes him one of the 21st century’s extraordinary leaders. But he is currently at risk of losing his re-election battle as rampant inflation and the mishandling of rescue efforts following an earthquake and its aftershocks wrecked the south of the country. Now we’re faced with the question of whether one of the longest-serving autocrats in Europe’s neighborhood could lose in the forthcoming election. This week we recorded the first of a two part episode on Turkey. This edition covers Erdogan’s rise to power, his ideology, the clash between Kemalists and Islamists and finally (for our Patreons only) a discussion of what could happen when Turks vote this week. Our guests for this deep dive into Turkey and its mercurial president are Birol Baskan, a professor at Georgetown University and non-resident scholar at The Middle East Institute. Professor Baskan has published a number of books including The Nation or the Ummah: Islamism and Turkish Foreign Policy (2021). We also welcomed back Ryan Gingeras, a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is the author of six books, and his most recent work The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire (2023) is available to purchase now and linked in the show notes. The views he expresses here are not those of the Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
89. Charles III: Last King of Britain? with Peter Riddell: “Soon there will only be five kings left: the king of spades, of clubs, of hearts, of diamonds, and the king of England”. King Farouk of Egypt was off in his prediction, but the permanency of the British monarchy has recently come under heightened scrutiny. The threat of independence from Britain’s constituent kingdoms, accelerated by Brexit, means that this could well be the Last King of Britain we see. Across the seas, Commonwealth members are expected to hold referenda on removing the British monarch as their head of state, something that many had only retained out of respect for the longevity of Elizabeth II. This is the challenge the latest person to sit on the Stone of Scone faces. Charles III has waited a long time to be King, but his reign could mark the end of one of Britain's most enduring institutions. The monarchy is but one of many constitutional institutions, and this week we also looked at the history of Parliament and its struggles with the Crown over the centuries, as well as the constitutional legacies of seminal figures in British history such as Oliver Cromwell. To explore this vast topic, we sat down with Sir Peter Riddell, a former journalist with the Financial Times and Times of London, and an Honorary Professor of History at University College London, where he works with the school’s Constitution Unit. We also covered recent constitutional crises stemming from the premiership of Boris Johnson and whether these exposed or validated the role of a monarch. Finally, our patreons will be able to hear an extended conversation on various constitutional reforms that have been floated in recent years, including by the commission led by Gordon Brown.
90. Zelensky's World Tour, Sunak's Comeback & Mitsotakis' Winning Formula—Decency Deep Dive: It's debating season again at Uncommon Decency. This week we are chatting about Zelensky's rock star world tour, unpacking the Greek center-right's triumph and weighing the Conservatives' (low) chances for a similar performance in the UK. Join us for our second Decency Deep Dive!
What I have been reading
Christopher Caldwell on Giuliano da Empoli's bestselling novel about Vladimir Putin, Le Mage du Kremlin, for The American Conservative.
Thomas Fazi for UnHerd on the rise of Europe's military austerity.
Sumantra Maitra for The American Conservative on Macron's wobbly concept of “strategic autonomy” in the wake of his China trip.
The end
Thank you all for reading! See you at the next issue.