Spain is different, obviously. Until the day before yesterday it had political prisoners in its jails, it still has members of a legitimately elected government, that of Catalonia, in exile, there are also artists in prison or exile for exercising their freedom of expression and it celebrates that the far right is trying to gain electoral advantage. Of course, the structures of the state have the ambience that they do and no-one even cares that the highest echelons of the Spanish judiciary, its senior civil service and defence leadership identify themselves with positions that you just don't see in countries of our European neighbourhood. It is clear that Vox is a problem and not a minor one, but Spain has had exiles and political prisoners and, in part, it still has them, first under a Popular Party government and now under another led by the PSOE and Unidas Podemos. Let's cut Vox off from the institutions and municipal and regional governments: to make their votes useless would be an act of democratic hygiene, but passing them from one to the other, as Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Casado do, shows an enormous cynicism that contributes nothing to the isolation of the party led by Santiago Abascal.
Starting on Sunday night itself, as soon as the results were known in Castilla y León, all that the PP and the PSOE have been doing is to make more important the 13 deputies and 17% of the votes that Vox got. Casado's party won the election, but the victory was so pyrrhic that Abascal's party took a hold of it and demanded the vice presidency. The PP leader's boastful gesture in front of Vox responds more to the stage fright of a mediocre politician in a bind than to his decision to send the pro-Franco party to the trash can and negotiate seriously with the Socialists, which would be what many European parties in the same ideological family would do. In Germany, for example, pacting with populists and xenophobes was rejected so strongly by former chancellor Merkel that she was even prepared to sacrifice a regional land if it came to it.
A very similar theatrical performance to that of the PP is being presented by the PSOE, which, far from approaching the Vox situation in terms of democratic hygiene, thinks about its electoral expectations and how to weaken the PP. This Tuesday, Sánchez urged Casado to break the pact with Vox if he wants to talk about socialist abstention in Castilla y León. In 2002, then-French Socialist party PM Lionel Jospin called the public to vote for right-wing candidate Jacques Chirac in the French presidential election - in order to oust Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen's father. Without asking for anything in return, but rather as an essential gesture to isolate the far right. Germany and France, different from each other in many ways - but with a very similar way of understanding what the response to the far right should be. It doesn't even cross their mind to try and win a few votes speculatively if what is at stake is something as important as isolating the extremists and preventing them from continuing to win positions.
Why isn't this done in Spain? In the coming weeks, we will witness a situation of normalization of Vox by the PP, and as well, we will see the left pointing the finger of blame at the conservative right, and I am enormously afraid that both will be comfortable with the narrative being drawn up. They will make their flirtations, of course, but that is also in the script as a way of trying to make the decision more understandable to the more moderate parts of their electorate. The Socialist mayor of Valladolid, Óscar Puente, is the only one who has dared talk about facilitating the investiture of the PP's Fernández Mañueco, but he has been shut up by the majority line, which hopes for an agreement between the PP and Vox to mobilize its electorate in the face of the upcoming Andalusian, municipal and Spanish elections. The trio of elections that are heading toward us, and that, when read from the Catalan point of view, do nothing but bury the dialogue table so deeply, so deeply, that even those who have defended it can no longer see it.