Somewhere / Anywhere
We Shall Take It by Other Means - PSOE (Part 1)
Send us Fan Mail Spanish Political Parties Series Part 4 of 8 Every origin story worth telling has its incongruities, and the Spanish Socialist Party offers a particularly rich one. The first episode of this 3-part episode opens with a Bizet aria, a wall of Goya’s blackest paintings arriving at the Prado, and a founding manifesto proclaiming the war between two unequal and antagonistic classes. From these three artifacts the conversation reconstructs how a party born among Madrid café printers in 1879, with the husband of Karl Marx’s daughter Laura sitting at the table, grew over the following century into the organization that would claim to embody modern Spain itself. It is, Diego and Rasheed, insist, a story that cannot be told without the deep history surrounding it. So before the socialists do much of anything, we pass through the long and turbulent nineteenth century that produced them, the dynastic civil wars fought in the name of a pretender called Carlos, the glorious revolution that toppled Isabella II, the brief farce of an imported Italian king, and the conservative settlement that Antonio Cánovas del Castillo engineered to end the chaos. That settlement, the Restoration, ran on turnismo, a gentleman’s agreement by which liberals and conservatives simply traded power between themselves, and the hosts cannot resist noting how closely the complaint resembles the charge of bipartidismo leveled at the two large parties today. Support the show
