Overtaken By The Fear: Election year

Months to go yet, but election fever has already brought us out with the irritated rashes of hyped-up anticipation and psephological analysis. The intravenous drip for political overdose will become whole transfusions as the days of reckoning loom ever closer. If there were only one day, the fever might rage less, but there are two: an electoral epidemic and a plague of "partidos".

I am of course referring to the Balearics and Spain and not another place, where the fever has disturbed minds with a collective hallucination of lysergic counter-reality. The other place stands on the window ledge of a bad trip of xenophobe demons, bearing bows of burning gold, arrows of desire and chariots of fire, with a pint-swilling figure like Batman's Joker cackling maniacally and willing it to jump to a cold earth of pleasant pastures seen. But that's the other place. It isn't here.

Yet another poll has come out. A survey carried out across all seventeen of Spain's autonomous communities suggests that the general election at the end of this year would see Rajoy's Partido Popular losing its majority along with up to 73 seats in the Congress of Deputies. By coincidence, 73 seats is the lower estimate of how many Podemos stands to gain.

Rajoy's election year started last year. The raft of tax reforms should have told you that an election was approaching. Bread and circuses and all that, does he really believe that the electorate will be appeased with some cuts to income tax? The electorate are not fools. They remember the days - BC (Before Crisis) - of lower taxes. They know that IVA has not been reduced, it having been increased twice over and been applied at higher rates on items that were previously at a reduced rate.

Bits of economic growth here, bits of economic growth there. Rajoy has turned Spain round, he says and will say. But do the electorate believe in bits of economic growth? It would take very sizable chunks of growth to truly eat into the unemployment statistics.

Tax cuts, bits of growth and fear. These will be the mantras. The fear is the one to be put into the electorate at the prospect of Podemos. It will not win the general election, but with a minimum of 73 seats it would be the third force, only maybe ten seats fewer than PSOE. The fear is not yet happening. It might not happen at all. Nationally, a great deal will depend upon the regional elections. Another strong showing by Podemos will be less easily dismissed as a protest vote, which was how last year's European elections were spun. Another strong showing and momentum might actually increase. Credibility of office would have been gained. The attempts to generate fear would go into overdrive: Pablo Iglesias is no new Messiah, he is the Devil Incarnate.

The electorate, however, can see through fear, that which emanates from Rajoy every time he presents himself for the electorate to witness. And what fear might there be in the televised debate? If Podemos maintains its poll position, how can Iglesias not be invited to join the table with Rajoy and Pedro Sánchez (assuming Sánchez hasn't been usurped by Susana Diaz)? Rajoy was cringeworthy in a winning cause during the debate last time. Iglesias would savage him. Rajoy would have to rely on the kind of sympathy shown to a wounded animal, were the electorate minded to be sympathetic. Not that it would. Corruption, the hypocrisy over abortion reform (clearly with another election in mind, despite the electoral pledge of 2011), the "gagging" law and the anti-democratic tendencies his government has shown: all cases for the electoral prosecution.

The fear will come in attacks on Podemos's own anti-democracy. So-called. But Rajoy and many others still fail to understand the dynamics that have propelled Podemos to where it is. Progeny of anti-globalisation, of the indignados movement, of the cruelty of evictions, it is also a product of what for some time has been envisaged as the new democracy of the internet. Citizen democracy, citizen participation: a legislative agenda predicated perhaps on the popular legislation already permitted for certain matters, as was demonstrated with bullfighting in Catalonia. This is far from undemocratic, but because it is new, there is a question: where are the limits to such citizen democracy, to the citizenry deciding policies? Are there any?

I refer at the top of this article to a plague of "partidos", but it is wrong to even refer to Podemos as a party. It is a movement, a mass that is liable to alter its form in accordance with popular will. It is of the left but it isn't of the left. It is new, entirely new, not comparable with parties elsewhere, be they in Greece, the UK or wherever. Over 200 years ago, Spain gave the world the notion of political liberalism. In 2015, the country is poised to give the world a whole new meaning of politics, one of an engagement that has broken down through conventional politics. Herein lies the fear. For Rajoy, for Sánchez. They fear being overtaken by something they don't understand.