The former minister for Foreign Affairs, Miguel Angel Moratinos./ Photo: La Razón.
The Diplomat. Madrid.
Miguel Ángel Moratinos, former minister of Foreign Affairs during most of the presidency of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, speaks for the first time in his personal blog about the election of the new secretary general for the PSOE. He does not choose any of the candidates looking for support, but he claims a “deep change” and criticizes the former leader of the socialists, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, for not knowing how to integrate the different sensitivities within the PSOE after his “Pyrrhic victory” in the Socialist Congress of Seville in 2012.
“It is true that the last two years have been part of one of the most negative periods in the long life of our organization. Many of us, almost half of the members, felt that the party needed a deep change and a renovation of its people, contents and ways of doing things”, assures the former chief of the Spanish diplomacy, who joined the PSOE at the beginning of the last decade with Bernardino León, another diplomat with the socialist card.
According to Moratinos, the results of the “unsuccessful” Congress of Seville have been unfortunate, electoral defeat after electoral defeat until these last European elections where disaffection has reached a historical maximum”. He states that the PSOE barely saved “the two percentage digits”, which means the barrier of the 20%, “but the tendency is inevitable: either we change or we disappear”.
The former minister criticizes the PSOE’s “secret” negotiations to make a great agreement with the PP
In this circumstances, the system and the members are reacting “in different ways”, in his opinion. “Some of them, those who do not wish to see a renovated and exciting party, act through inadequate practices, with apocalyptic predictions and with messages full of scepticism, confusion and contradiction to transmit a feeling of nostalgia: any past time was better”. Others want the change, “but they do not feel strong enough now to get rid of commitments and agreements from the past and they fear proposing innovative solutions for the new and deep challenges coming”. And finally, there are others “with good intentions” that, however, “lack the conviction to mobilize most of the members with proposals of change”.
Nevertheless, Moratinos remembers that none of them has presented what, in his opinion, is the most important thing: “a new story about the socialism of the 21st century with a detailed programme and that wins over the trust and excitement of a society that, just like the Spanish one, is disappointed and disoriented” with their party.
It is at that point when the former minister seems to be the most critical with those going to the PSOE the last two years. “Bad results cannot be justified if, on one hand, we proclaim and defend our traditional ideology and, on the other hand, we practice a neoliberal pragmatism. We cannot ignore the confusion generated when, on one hand, we turn to the recurring critics to the government and, on the other one, we make a great secret agreement PP-PSOE”, in reference to the last agreement made so that the law on Abdication was passed in a record time by the Courts.
Moratinos underlines that all the candidates who have expressed their wish to lead the PSOE until now have the capacity and the leading skills to do it, “but none of them will be able to boost a true renovation if they cannot unite a team and design a programme with contributions from everyone”. Therefore, he asks to avoid the mistakes of Seville and to stop talking about transitions, since the PSOE is at a “crossroads”.
