The triple crisis of the coronavirus in Spain
Marcelo Expósito[1]
I must begin this chronicle of the situation in Spain stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic by sending a warm embrace to our brothers and sisters in Argentina and Latin America. This is not only because of my emotional ties to the region, but also because it is clear to everyone that this global health crisis is linked to the decline of an order that has replaced empathy among peoples and the care of what we hold in common with the primacy of the elites' particular interests and the miscalculation of economic gains. The Executive Secretary of CLACSO herself, Karina Batthyány, has pointed out in these virtual pages the mismatch between the massive amounts of care demanded by this global emergency and the weakness of general awareness regarding how much attention is required to sustain our societies (“The pandemic reveals and exacerbates the care crisis”). CLACSO, 21/03/2020).
The Spanish ecofeminist Yayo Herrero has posed the same contradiction in another way with this powerful image: the “health” of economies has been directly proportional to the destruction of the material bases that sustain life (“At War with Life”, CTXT(March 3, 2020). We urgently need to reverse this misguided prioritization of the needs of our political communities, and even our genuine needs as a species on this planet. And if I begin by outlining this general framework, it is for the following reason: it is not insignificant that Spain is a country where the pandemic is being considered with particular intensity, interpreted as an eco-social crisis (Joan Benach, “We must take advantage of this pandemic to make a radical social change”). Sinpermiso(28/03/2020). That our civil society is able to imagine the following scenarios and demand them forcefully will be crucial if we want to overcome this extremely painful crisis through democratic radicalization.
Some may be surprised that we so readily link an epidemiological problem to the political struggles against the authoritarian drift of neoliberalism within the context of the crisis of democracy. As I write these lines, nearly 12.000 people have died from COVID-19 in Spain, with some 125.000 diagnosed cases. The lack of testing, the strain on our public healthcare system, and the irregular nature of the symptoms that indicate infection make it impossible to calculate the number of people who may have been infected but not yet counted: Imperial College London estimates that there are around 7 million in our country. The death rate is still hovering around 800 per day, after 21 days of a state of emergency and a quarantine so rigorous that it may have already saved some 16.000 lives. These are chilling figures that are suffocating if they are not analyzed. Of the approximately 4.200 deaths in Madrid, 3.000 have occurred in nursing homes. This has been grudgingly acknowledged by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid, a fourth-rate politician who rose to power thanks to the fall of the corrupt leadership of the People's Party in the region and who currently governs with the support of the new right-wing Citizens party and the far-right Vox party. A recent journalistic report has given meaning to this terrifying figure: the lucrative, dirty deals of privatizing services have left 75% of Madrid's (scandalously expensive) senior centers in a state of disrepair in the hands of multinationals and vulture funds (“Elderly Parking, Inc.”). CTXT, 29/03/2020).
In light of these analyses, we understand how the repeated warning that older people are the main at-risk group in the face of the pandemic is a medical truth closely linked to a political reality. It is demonstrated that, through privatization, neoliberalism has not only dictated which lives are worth living and which are disposable. It has also squeezed dry, right to the point of death, those lives that no longer served to generate profit after entire lives dedicated to working and caring for their families. And this neoliberal extractivism applied to the lives of the elderly has occurred precisely by exploiting the need for care in our final years. It is thus understandable that the aggressiveness of the coronavirus in Spain has been fueled by the effect of the austerity policies implemented after the 2008 financial crisis. Austerity has plundered family finances, made work precarious, impoverished lives, and caused widespread psychological devastation in Spain and throughout southern Europe. This backdrop must be taken into account to fully understand the virulence of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. It is also essential to grasp the complexity of the ongoing struggle to address this public health crisis.
If the 2020 health crisis is triggering a dizzying economic crisis—in March, 840.000 workers were unemployed or on temporary layoffs—the 2008 financial crisis previously became a crisis of the democracy that emerged from the Spanish Transition, the system we call the “78 regime” because of the year the current Constitution was approved. These three crises—health, economic, and political—are now overlapping, making 2008 resonate with the present and turning the coronavirus pandemic into a triple crisis. Thus, the emergency public policies being adopted acknowledge the interrelation between these three levels of instability. And if a new, purely austerity-driven blow seems increasingly unlikely, it is surely for two main reasons.
The first reason is that the Spanish political crisis, which has dragged on for over a decade, remains an open-ended scenario. While a simple restoration of the low-intensity democracy of the 78 regime is no longer possible, the changes that have taken place also fail to fulfill all the constitutional ruptures demanded by the 15M protests in 2011. In fact, not all the changes in our political system have been for the better: Spain is no longer the European exception to the rise of the far right, and Vox is currently the third-largest party in Congress. Despite all this, the coronavirus crisis erupted while a left-wing coalition was in power in Spain. The current Socialist president, Pedro Sánchez, had to reach an agreement with Unidas Podemos in 2019, after resisting for three long years of intense parliamentary wrangling. Fortunately, it is clear that the alignment of forces that keeps Sánchez in power is primarily aimed at finding a way out of this serious situation through progressive policies. Without the presence of Unidas Podemos in the Spanish Government, there would be a greater risk that the geometry of agreements to face the triple crisis will end up being different.
The second reason the austerity dogma seems to have imploded has to do with how the coronavirus has deadly revealed how European societies have ceased to be safe and stable, to the point that Spain and Italy are currently the global epicenter of the pandemic. The impact of the neoliberal management of the 2008 crisis left our lives in a fragile state, but the COVID-19 pandemic is—literally—devastating them. It's not just the deaths, horrifying as they are. It's our entire sensibility that is being affected: isolated in forced confinement, the rituals of mourning are made difficult to the point of being heartbreaking. Simultaneously, and without respite, hundreds of thousands of people face bleak job prospects once the quarantine is lifted.
Is it reasonable to think that simply reissuing the financial bailout plan that injected €40.000 billion into Spanish banks ten years ago, a sum that has never been repaid, would suffice? The health crisis has pushed the social majority so literally to the limits of their resilience that not only the economic and political systems, but even society as a whole could collapse without support. Perhaps this is another good reason why the neoliberal dogma is being swept away by this 2020 crisis and defeated by a new paradigm. It is the common sense that citizens demonstrate when they applaud en masse from their balconies every day at 20 p.m.—with a symbolically extraordinary sound—for the titanic care work being carried out by public healthcare workers who are assuming great personal risks.
In successive public appearances, Pedro Sánchez is adopting an ambivalent dual role. Favored by the state of emergency, he is tending towards a plenipotentiary presidentialism against which we should be vigilant, as I explained in another article (“The Coronavirus in Thermidor”). CTXT(March 23, 2020). At the same time, the inevitability of what we called a “citizen rescue plan” in the squares of 2011 is becoming increasingly apparent—precisely the social program with which the new left organizations made the electoral leap into government. The measures that the government is enacting, mainly under the influence of the Ministry of Labor, headed by the highly competent Yolanda Díaz of Unidas Podemos, were inconceivable until just a year ago. For example, the prohibition of layoffs, evictions for mortgage defaults, and the cutting off of basic energy supplies during the health crisis. The debate on implementing a basic income is even gaining momentum (Daniel Raventós et al., “Basic Income, Pandemic and Recession”). Public, 31/03/2020), which, even if circumstantial, would open a huge gap: it would be nothing less than being able to make the leap from a palliative policy in the face of the crisis —in other words, a provisional negotiation between democracy and neoliberalism— to a possible new post-neoliberal redistributive policy.
All of this means that the central confrontation of the 2008 crisis—a citizen rescue plan versus authoritarianism—is transforming in 2020 into this: either a palliative social rescue plan is implemented with the intention of somehow readjusting the previous order, or a social redistribution of wealth occurs through robust public policies, where the State assumes a new leading role without stifling the initiative of organized civil society. If you prefer, this could be achieved through a new historical alliance between the public and the commons. This is a war being waged on at least two geopolitical levels. Within the framework of our State, but also, and crucially, on a European scale, because the European Union can no longer ignore that it is affected by this lethal combination of the three dimensions of the crisis: simultaneously health, economic, and political. Given the now unavoidable debate on whether to "mutualize the debt" that would be required for the implementation of a major social rescue plan, the alignments that are emerging are not accidental. Spain and Italy have proposed it with the explicit support of Portugal and the measured rejection of the Netherlands and Germany (Steven Forti, “Coronabonds: Yes or No?”, CTXT(April 2, 2020). In other words, the PIGS (the “pigs,” the derogatory acronym used by Central and Northern European countries to refer to Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain during the 2008 crisis) are openly proposing the need for a kind of inter-European Marshall Plan, encountering an ambivalent attitude from French President Emmanuel Macron. Hesitant social democracy (or, rather, the various mutations that socialists have undergone after the implosion of the socio-liberal historical cycle) is one of the variables that will determine the future of a European project that, infected by COVID-19, is currently struggling to breathe.
The triple crisis of the coronavirus in Spain thus oscillates between our own bodies and Europe. Therefore, this article cannot end without returning to the beginning: another major variable will be the citizenry. Confined to their homes, going in and out of hospitals, anxiously awaiting news of the health of their elderly relatives, keeping their children in lockdown, and testing themselves for symptoms of the disease, they must still find the strength to confront this historic crossroads at which the pandemic has placed us, a crossroads where we are literally risking our lives: more democracy or reform of the previous barbarity.
[1] Artist and cultural critic, author of the book Plebeian speeches (2019). He has been secretary of the Congress and deputy in the Spanish Cortes Generales between 2016-2019.
[+] Thinking about the pandemic
If you would like to receive more information about CLACSO's training programs:
[widget id=”custom_html-57″]
to our email lists.
