The bleakness of the current conjuncture from the perspective of democracy is perhaps best captured by the farcical collusion in August of 2011 of the socialist Zapatero government with Rajoy’s conservative party then in opposition in agreeing to amend the Spanish Constitution so as to prohibit budgetary deficits – the Tea Party’s wildest dream – a move that explicitly imitates a 2009 German reform and basically rules out by constitutional fiat recourse to counter-cyclical stimulus packages. And they did so without even bothering to consult the demos via referendum about taking such a drastic measure. Their alibi for colluding in this neo-liberal constitutional coup: credibility (literally!) in the eyes of financial markets. The Constitutional pantomime proved particularly unpalatable and therefore damaging to the credibility of the main parties, not only because it revealed them to be supine before the Gods of international finance, but also because both main parties (especially the conservative Partido Popular) had spent a good part of the previous decade responding to peripheral nationalist demands for constitutional reform with a variety of arguments centered around the theme of the need to be cautious before “opening up the Constitutional melon” and fiddling with the great but delicate historic achievement of the exceptionally broad constitutional consensus forged by the “Fathers” of the Constitution and ratified via referendum back in 1978.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Mar 2014 10:53:05 +0000
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