Celestí Alomar's final tribute to the party he helped found

PalmThe afternoon of February 18, 1976, in an apartment on Catalunya street in Ciutat, the Socialist Party of the Balearic Islands was presented to the media. A drizzle of drizzle barely wet the road, while a squad of police from the Social Political Brigade was lurking in the street. It had been barely three months since the dictator's death. A broad group of citizens with a firm and active commitment to anti-Francoism had participated in the creation process of the new party: from Bandera Roja (who came from the Communist Party of Spain, which they had joined a year earlier), from the Popular Socialist Party and other left-wing organizations, trade unionists, from nationalist circles, and independents who had participated in a debate process around the idea.

Finding an organizational model capable of bringing together all these different tendencies and political families was not a minor issue. An attractive formula was that of the French Socialist Party, which integrated a wide range of the left in that country. The proposal did not go as far as the French model, as some people with a "weak" track record under the dictatorship had been excluded or left waiting. The truth is that the PSI was an organization that was still to be molded, but the proposal was timely and necessary and also exciting. This initial tenderness, in part, would mark the evolution in the future.

Model of social democracy

To better situate the proposal, it is worth remembering the international context of the time. The social democratic model was triumphant, which in Europe had also, to a great extent, been endorsed by Christian democratic parties. But as early as 1972, President Nixon initiated a first attack on the world equilibrium that emerged from the Bretton Woods Agreements (in 1944, when World War II had not yet ended) and on the welfare state model that provided stability and economic and social progress to the new world order. Then came Margaret Thatcher (1979) and Ronald Reagan (1981), who would definitively drive the neoliberal agenda. Capital, furtively, began the path towards deregulation. Over time, the offshoring of production would be provoked and neoliberal globalization would be imposed, in which growth has become a synonym for destruction. Inevitably, all this had to lead to a maximum concentration of wealth in a few hands and a global and social inequality that had never been seen before.

The PSI and similar parties represented principles radically different from the neoliberal ones: the defense of inclusive progress, rooted in the nation, to reach the most universal values in the community of nations in a solidary and generous way. The proposal was not to isolate oneself from the global world, but to reconcile oneself with the world of the people, with individuals at the center of politics and emancipatory humanism.

As I said, there was still much to be done. The PSI, together with other parties (Partit Socialista de Catalunya - Congrés (PSC-C), Partit Socialista del País Valencià (PSPV), Partido Socialista Galego, Eusko Sozialistak, Partido Socialista de Andalucía, Partido Autonomista Socialista de Canarias, Partido Socialista de Aragón and Convergencia Socialista de Madrid (CSM), among others) was part of the Federation of Socialist Parties. The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), which was trying to regain its historical prominence at the Suresnes Congress (1974), had a weak structure of active membership within the State, which the parties of the Federation, forged in clandestine struggle, did have.

At the Suresnes Congress, the PSOE, under the direction of Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra and influenced by the anti-Franco struggles in the State, incorporated the “full recognition of the right to self-determination” as a proposal. The term would remain in the socialist maximum program until the XXVIII Congress in 1979, and would finally disappear definitively in 2019, when any referendum on self-determination was explicitly rejected as unconstitutional. Time would show that the “practicality” of one (Felipe González) and the Jacobinism of the other (Alfonso Guerra) would be incompatible with a federal model without adjectives.

But, at that time, the proposal helped some sectors from Bandera Roja, with a strong workerist component, to join the socialists' party in Mallorca. Nevertheless, the nationalist soul of the new party remained intact, which would quickly become the organization's emblem. I am unable to ascertain to what extent this episode, already as PSM, marked the subsequent coalition strategy, initiated in 2003, which has led to the current party MÉS per Mallorca, a reference for Mallorcan progressive nationalism.

Authoritarian proposals

Today, the proposal maintains the same initial validity and consistency. Now, very especially, in a world where the neoliberal model has entered a path of continuous 'multicrisis'. Capital fears the street, social movements, everything that is concrete and close to people. It is committed to removing collective memory and daily reality from the debate to replace them with an alienating informational product. Authoritarian proposals proliferate, fostered by so-called technooligarchs and a populist-integrist and authoritarian far-right international, which had been gestating since the last century, within a framework where the great powers are led by characters with emperor-like pretensions. It is the perfect catastrophe, where capital leads us to a world in which the great enemies intend to become invisible, protected by a colossal informational apparatus.

Articulating a progressive alternative at this time is not easy. But it is undeniable that the path remains anchored to the country of the people, in a lasting sense of class and far from the prefabricated formulas of the devilish market consumerism and close to the real things that give meaning to human life: insisting on the concrete to be generously universal. 50 years of existence demonstrate that this progressive and federal proposal was necessary and, today, it is still hopeful.