A Rising Xenophobic Right in Spain?

Of all of Europe's major countries, Spain is the only one not home to a far-right. There is no xenophobic party of note in Spanish politics which is a high reflection of contemporary Spanish morals since it is in living memory that the nation was ruled under a military and indoctrinating fascist regime.

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Spaniards pride themselves as being open and friendly to immigrants and the nation's culture is less rigid and more flexible, thus more multicultural, than, say, France with its constant lecturing to immigrants and their children on the need to embrace seemingly elusive 'Francaise' values by which they entail the renunciation of one's Islamic faith and Arab/Berber culture. At times, assimilating into France seems like an impossible and humiliating task. There is little respect and French society makes little room for anything seen as 'foreign'.

Even a casual visitor to both nations (like myself), feels that Barcelona is a lot more embracing city than Paris. And it is not just the fact that the former is on the coast, Nice and Cannes also lack Barca's charm and tolerant culture. I remembering being in a famous market in Barcelona and seeing a veiled Muslim woman and think 'she perfectly fits in against the Spanish backdrop'. I did not have that feeling seeing veiled women in Paris or Milan.

But it is not just a feel-wheeling Spanish culture (the Spaniards, I learned first hand, know how to have fun in a way Parisians do not), but also Spanish memories of their own roles as immigrants that informs this tolerance. Spain has had an incredible transformation in the last two decades, but it was not long ago that the country was poor, based on an agricultural economy and the income sent back from family working in France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The Spanish were the underclass of Europe and their workers did a lot of the heavy-lifting construction and other manual labor throughout the wealthier part of the continent. So much of modern day Paris is built by Spanish hands. Thus wealthier now, the Spanish emphasize with the poorer Moroccans, Africans and Columbian who do the work in Spain - it is immigrants who are behind the previous construction boom in the country - that the Spanish themselves used to do elsewhere.

This is why anti-immigrant rhetoric does not play well in the country, because many Spanish themselves or someone they know was once that immigrant being scolded by today's politicians. But this harmony may becoming to an end due to the high unemployment in Spain and the economic recession. Immigrants are fine for the good times, but when millions of Spaniards cannot find work and the state budget is under enormous pressure then immigrants make a convenient and unsympathetic target:

IT WAS a familiar cry against immigration. There is just not room for everyone, proclaimed Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, leader of the People’s Party (PP) in Catalonia, where an election is due later this year. Her complaint has come a bit late. Spain’s decade-long surge of immigrants has already come to a dramatic halt. The number of foreigners of working age began to fall in the second half of 2009. Recession has proved far more effective than policy at stemming the flow. A country in which unemployment has just gone over 4m and is heading towards a 20% rate is a poor bet for migrants.

So why is the PP raising what, in Spanish terms, is the novel bogeyman of immigration? In fairness, some others got there first. A coalition of Catalan nationalists, separatists and Socialists running the town hall at Vic, in Catalonia, put foreigners at the centre of debate with a controversial plan to keep some immigrants off municipal registers of residents. The Vic plan was similar to one already in place in Torrejón de Ardoz, a PP-run Madrid suburb.

This has provoked uproar in a country that prides itself on being immigrant-friendly. Municipal registers guarantee access to free health and education. The government is not going to consent to town-hall chicanery just to stop immigrant families getting health care or education for their children, said the Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. As many as 2.5m immigrants have arrived in Spain since he took office in 2004.

Critics say this is all unnecessary scaremongering. A decade-long boom has seen Spain’s immigrant population swell from 2% of the total to 12%, or 5.6m. Immigrants were big contributors to Spain’s economic success. Integration has been only a partial success. There are almost no immigrant police officers. Black Africans still find some nightclubs closed to them. But friction is minimal. Even in Vic, where an anti-immigrant party came second in local elections, a poll puts immigrants (who make up 23% of the population) below parks and car parking as matters of local concern.

Some have tried and failed to make immigration a political issue before. But a sea-change in political attitudes may be coming. Joaquín Arango, of Madrid’s Complutense University, points out that the PP is an exception on the European right in that it has not turned immigration into a political battlefield. It would be natural for the right to behave more as it does elsewhere, he says.

It is encouraging that that Spanish government has rebuffed such anti-immigrant measures. The Spaniards should not let hard time change their tolerance and tone of politics. The economy will rebound, but a politics of xenophobia once ingrained is hard to remove and such an image will often tarnish the reputation of a nation long past its tawdry moment.

Source. The Economist.