Spain’s opportunist United Left.docVIP

Spain’s opportunist United Left forms “broad front” By Paul Mitchell?29 August 2011 Since its formation in 1986, the United Left (IU), a coalition led by the Communist Party (PCE), regionalist groups and the Greens, has based itself on the idea that the ruling Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) can be pressured to the left. Meanwhile, the PSOE has marched steadily to the right. After the global financial collapse erupted in 2008, José Luis Zapatero’s PSOE government, with the assistance of the trade unions, began imposing massive spending cuts, cutting wages and pensions and attacking working conditions. The PSOE has committed itself, should it win upcoming elections, to doing whatever the European Union and International Monetary Fund demand. Zapatero’s actions have discredited the PSOE in the eyes of broad masses of workers and youth, and the party suffered its worst defeat in its history in local and regional elections in May. At the same time, many people have rightly come to view the IU as a servile and unprincipled junior partner of the PSOE and an integral part of the political establishment. The IU’s national parliamentary group has shrunk from 21 seats in 1996 to only 2 today, and it lost Cordoba, the only city under its control, in May. The IU’s decline takes place under conditions of growing militancy and resistance. Last year, a general strike brought the country to a standstill. This year, the?indignados?(angry ones), also known as the March 15 movement, erupted outside of the control of the political parties and trade unions, bringing hundreds of thousands onto the streets across the country. This has prompted the IU to make a feint to the left in an attempt to restore its political standing. After the May election, former IU Coordinator and current Congress spokesman Gaspar Llamazares laid the blame on the IU federation (national organisation) for its failure to ”capitalise” on the discrediting of the PSOE and to establish the coalition as a “real altern