About the Ban Against Internationalist Initiative

This article was published at Workers World:

Madrid court outlaws anti-capitalist party

John Catalinotto

By outlawing a new political party from an upcoming June 7 ballot, ruling circles in the Spanish regime are exposing their links to the 36-year-long fascist reign of Francisco Franco. Their latest anti-democratic step involved fraudulent charges to prevent the newly formed International Initiative—Solidarity among the Peoples (II-SP) organization from competing in elections to the European Parliament.

Spain’s Supreme Court on May 16 by an 11-5 majority supported a lower court decision to ban the II-SP. The new party is appealing to the Constitutional Court to reverse this, while waging an international petition campaign to gain support. A final May 21 decision is likely to maintain the ban, unless a massive struggle arises to reverse it.

The courts are imposing the ban in the midst of the economic crisis that exploded in 2008 and hit Spain much harder than most other developed capitalist countries. The “housing bubble” burst with a fury in Spain, stopping almost all new construction projects. Official unemployment climbed to more than 17 percent in April. Young people can’t find permanent jobs.

To underline an anti-capitalist solution to this crisis, some leftist parties, both on a federal level and in the regions that consist of oppressed nations within the Spanish state, joined together this spring to form the II-SP. They offered a relatively broad but clearly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist alternative.

The II-SP competes not only with rightist bourgeois parties like José María Aznar’s People’s Party, but also with Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s governing Socialist Workers Party (PSOE). It considers Zapatero pro-capitalist, despite his “socialist” label. It competes even with the United Left (IU) movement—the traditional Spanish left close to the Spanish Communist Party—that revolutionaries consider to be trapped inside the capitalist parliamentary system.

Historically, the Spanish state has included at least four peoples or nationalities. The people of Galicia in the northwest, of Catalonia in the east, and of the Basque Country in the northeast have been under the heel of the Castilian ruling class. Repression was especially brutal during the Franco period against local customs and any languages other than Castilian Spanish.

Today it also includes immigrants from Africa and Latin America, who face racial discrimination.

In carrying out the struggle for Basque self-determination, Basque freedom fighters set up an organization in 1959 known as ETA, an acronym for the Basque words meaning Basque Homeland and Freedom. ETA evolved into a guerrilla group that carried out armed actions against the Spanish state, both during the fascist period and afterwards.

The Spanish ruling class took the same approach toward ETA as the British rulers did toward the Irish Republican Army and the U.S. toward Puerto Rican patriots: repression. They hunted down ETA members and also jailed thousands of Basques involved in political struggles.

This repression extended to pro-independence political organizations in the Basque Country. The “Law of the Parties” of 2002 outlawed Batasuna, the political party that shared the same political program as the guerrilla group ETA. After Batasuna was made illegal, the AVN (Basque Nationalist Action) was set up to politically represent Basque self-determination. The courts then outlawed AVN.

Thus in today’s Spanish state, Basques who are for independence or autonomy have no legal political party, while former fascist youth like Aznar can run the government.

II-SP supports self-determination

The II-SP supports self-determination for Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque Country. The leading figure on the II-SP ticket, world-famous playwright and historical anti-fascist elder Alfonso Sastre, also led the AVN ticket in a recent election before the AVN was banned. Number two on the II-SP slate, Doris Benegas from the Castilian Left, and number five, Ángeles Maestro of the Red Current, are leaders who have politically supported Basque self-determination. They participated in meetings supporting Basque political prisoners and honoring Basque martyrs.

As Maestro told the media, none of these candidates belongs to ETA, nor does the II-SP advocate armed struggle, nor are the candidates of Basque nationality. Yet the Spanish regime and courts have applied the “Law of Parties” to outlaw the II-SP from the election.

The state’s argument—if you can believe it—is that Basques who support Batasuna and who see Sastre heading the list might consider II-SP an indirect representative of Batasuna’s program. Pro-independence Basques might feel inspired by voting for II-SP and encouraged to continue the struggle and thus, the court reasoned, it must ban II-SP.

Continuing to fight for its place on the ballot, II-SP asks for support inside and outside Spain on a petition to defend “democracy and the presumption of innocence.” Already Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel of Argentina has written to Zapatero urging him to “intervene” to “avoid anti-democratic actions” by the courts against II-SP.

Inside the Spanish state, other federal parties on the ballot like the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain (PCPE) and the Anti-capitalist Initiative (IA) have demanded that the ban on II-SP be lifted. The Basque Left denied it was manipulating II-SP and expressed solidarity with II-SP’s right to be on the ballot.

There are reports the IU is split on this question. So far the IU leadership has said only that it will support the decision of the courts in this matter.

Slanders from the rightist parties, the regime and the media against the militants of II-SP may prevent the election of the II-SP candidates, but even this hostile publicity has exposed many millions of people to this party’s existence and potentially its program at the beginning of an intense class struggle in the Spanish state.

E-mail: jcat@workers.org

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Note: The article was written before Spain's constitutional court revoked the ban by the supreme court and published one day too late, but still, it provides important information to help our readers understand that Spain is not a democratic state.

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Bitter Taste

The article from Victor Mallet that you are about to read was published at the Financial Times contains a basic flaw, it departs from the misconception that the pro-independence vote in the recent Basque electoral process was lower than before when in fact it was higher. If the rabidly pro-Spain parties were able to size control was due to a fascist law that enables Madrid to outlaw any Basque party that they want to keep out of the process to ensure "success" to the parties that consider the perpetuation of Spain's colonial rule over the Basque Country as a priority. After more than 100,000 votes were declared null by Madrid, the political landscape was so thrown out of balance that the PSOE was able to become the party in control of the situation.

Here you have the article which in fact contains interesting info about the status quo between the Spanish State and Euskal Herria, Catalunya and Galiza, the nations abducted by Spain's statehood.

Global Insight: Spanish brew has bitter taste

By Victor Mallet in Madrid


Galician nationalists have lost power in Galicia. Basque nationalists have lost power in the Basque country. At first glance, the results of the two Spanish regional elections in March suggest that ethnic nationalism on the Iberian peninsula is in retreat.

Spain is not unique as a fragile nation state with centrifugal communities on its fringes: the closest comparison is probably with Britain, where Scotland looks far more likely to secede from the union than the Basque country or Catalonia do from Spain.

But the legacy of the civil war in the 1930s means that nationalism is a particularly sensitive issue today for the inhabitants of Spain, whether they call themselves Spaniards, Castilians, Catalans or Cantabrians.

After Francisco Franco, the civil war victor, died in 1975, Spain celebrated the end of his dictatorship – and its harsh suppression of diverse languages and cultures – with a liberal constitution enshrining regional autonomy within a united Spain.

The obvious beneficiaries were the Basques, Galicians and Catalans but, since it was unfair to exclude Andalucians, Valencians or anyone else, the policy adopted was café para todos: coffee for all – and so modern Spain consists of 17 autonomous communities and two enclaves in north Africa.

Support for full independence is mostly confined to the Basque country, where Eta militants pursue a campaign of terror against the Spanish state and those deemed to have collaborated with it.

But many non-Castilians do favour more autonomy and speak vaguely of having their region recognised as part of the European Union rather than of Spain. Autonomy is credited with reviving neglected cultures. Catalonia, brimming with confidence, has established delegations, shadow embassies, in cities such as London and Brussels.

Yet many Spaniards, including those who voted for the unionist parties that won the latest regional elections, say the pendulum has now swung too far in the direction of autonomy.

There is a whiff of centrist counter-revolution in the air, a sense that Spain will fall apart if Madrid is too lenient with the regions. That is one reason for the scant criticism at home of Spain’s divergence from most European partners in refusing to recognise the independence of Kosovo.

Language policy has been especially contentious, with moves by regional governments to impose Catalan, Galician or Basque in schools and the civil service provoking angry reactions from Spanish-speaking residents. Dozens of doctors in Ibiza, for example, have threatened to leave the island because of the Balearic regional government’s insistence that they be tested in Catalan, the local language.

Forced marches towards linguistic divergence have gathered pace in a manner that intrigues philologists but is regarded as artificial and politically dangerous by Spanish nationalists. Catalan speakers, ironically, can be very protective of their own language while simultaneously mocking the pretensions of Valenciano and Mallorquí, the Catalan dialects of Valencia and Mallorca, to an independent existence.

Charles de Gaulle, to illustrate the difficulty of running a diverse nation, famously referred to the hundreds of different cheeses produced in France. But neither he nor his successors would have tolerated the number of languages and dialects officially promoted in Spain today – let alone accepted the need for simultaneous interpreters for television news coverage on election night.

Autonomy is not only occasionally inconvenient for those who want to speak Spanish. Investors, domestic and foreign, complain bitterly about the extra bureaucracy imposed by regional governments, costs that Spain can ill afford as it plunges into the deepest recession in memory. “The administration in Spain suffers from elephantiasis,” was the verdict of one unionist lawyer in Madrid recently.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, is in a trap set by Spain’s democratic constitution for governments without an absolute majority in parliament. He senses the worries of voters before the European elections in June and his instincts are to promote Spanish unity. But he needs the votes of regional parties, particularly the Catalans, ito pass legislation and stay in control of Spain.

Unfortunately for Mr Zapatero, every regional government from Galicia to Murcia is determined to hang on to the powers it gained after Franco’s death. Café para todos is a stimulating brew that no one wants to forgo. When the waiter comes, however, no one wants to pay the bill.

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