Solidaridad: How Spanish Nationalists Built an Alternative Trade Union Network
Any given European populist party is just the tip of the institutional iceberg, or at least it should be.
Political change is not won by front-facing politicians or candidates alone but by a web of civil society organisations, academic institutes, and grassroots mobilisations all able to shift the needle in their own unique way.
The trade union wing of the Spanish populist party VOX, Solidaridad is part of a greater theory of change invoked by patriots having been launched in 2020 as an alternative to pathologically corrupt left-wing sindicatos and Mammon-focused corporations.
As part of a wider effort to understand the rise of right-wing movements across Europe, MEON sat down with Rodrigo Alonso Fernandez from Solidaridad to discuss the experiences of the trade union, which purposefully blends patriotic politics and labour activism.
Forged in 2013 through an alliance of disaffected centre right Partido Popular members and anti-separatist activists, VOX takes a rigid stance in favour of Spanish unity against the autocratic regime of socialist PM Pedro Sánchez.
The explicit aim of Solidaridad since inception has been to wage an institutional war against the “corrupted oligarchies” of Spanish public life according to VOX leader Santiago Abascal with an estimated 13,000 plus members as of 2022 throughout various industries.
According to Fernandez, the need to create Solidaridad was threefold: to provide a nationalist answer to the internationalist policy of corporations offshoring jobs away from Spain and the equally pernicious phenomenon of mass immigration.
“Secondly, the existence of a union like Solidaridad was imperative to break with decades of impunity and complicity on the part of the majority and left-wing unions. They have always lived very well in the shelter of power and the bosses, receiving millions of euros in subsidies at the cost of harming the workers and keeping silent in the face of the outrages committed against them”
The final reason was to create a brand of Spanish trade unionism not beholden to anti-nationalist ideology and equally did not live off state or member subsidies.
This vision is popular among Spanish workers with Solidaridad unnerving communist rivals for how quickly their brand of patriotic socialism captured 23% of the popular vote in certain delegate votes, easily surpassing socialist-aligned unions such as Comisiones Obreras.
Among the services provided by Solidaridad to its thousands of members include legal services in the event of political persecution or the regular injustices experienced by workers from unscrupulous bosses.
To the embarrassment of red unions, Solidaridad is practically the only trade union calling for a general strike against Spain's ruling socialist junta despite criticisms from Marxists of being mere Francoist nostalgists or crypto-fascist stooges.
Solidaridad has recently found a niche for itself representing farmers amid a wider European revolt on the matter against green policies additionally serving to represent industrial workers for negotiations over pay and conditions.
Democratic in orientation Solidaridad members elect 500 delegates each year to decide policy goals.
Immediately unsettling the Spanish rotten borough of union officials controlled by the socialist PSOE and more extreme communist factions, Solidaridad has faced a string of legal harassment and outright extortion for presenting a patriotic answer to the labour question.
“Not only at the media level, caricaturing our work, defaming and creating false labels against us, but they have established in the workplaces a method of coercion of our members more typical of a mafia than of an organization that claims to defend labor rights.”
Answering questions about the ideological future of labour activism at a time when the working classes are breaking in favour of nationalism across the Continent Fernandez stresses that ”it is not possible to speak of Homeland without speaking of its workers” in answer to those who think the workplace can be ignored on the right.
“The world in which we live and its axes of power have changed. Now the division is centered on two well-differentiated positions. In the first instance are those who support the interests of the powerful, the bureaucrats of supranational governments, and the interests of large multinational corporations, i.e. globalism. And in the second position are those who believe in their country's economy, in small and medium-sized enterprises, who believe that the interests of our economy and the viability of the welfare of our people are above any spurious interest of foreign capital”
Aiming to plow ahead in chipping away at the alliance of crooked bosses and shift union leaders who are in concurrence on the denationalisation of Spanish workers, Fernandez stresses that ignoring the civil society arena is foolish for any would-be Irish nationalists.
Always seeking to export the Solidaridad model abroad in March of last year the trade union held meetings at the European Parliament to seek partners across the EU where their experiences could be replicated.
For an Irish audience the fusionary politics of Solidaridad is hardly novel considering that the greatest proponent of Irish socialism came up with the formulation "the cause of Labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of Labour. They cannot be dissevered."
Just try to tell SIPTU that.