“In the Spaniard’s heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love of truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance.”

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I stumbled upon this quote recently as the tributes poured in for Cormac McCarthy, perhaps the greatest American novelist of the last forty years who died recently. McCarthy, who spent time living on Ibiza when it was still a refuge for creative types, did not write about Spain (although the Spanish language did frequently feature in his books). But some of his God-like generalisations do have a resonance as the country ends its general election campaign and votes.

“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.”

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

What a dispiriting, unhappy thing this campaign has been. Devoid of vision or hope both sides, left and right, have turned it into a doped-up project fear. The left’s warning is the more concrete: the arrival of the Popular Party (PP) in government will also mean the arrival of the far right in government; a far right who question climate science, remove LGBTQ flags from public buildings, refuse to show Disney films with female characters kissing and demonise immigrant children.

For the right, the warning is against something both more visible and yet more abstract: Sanchismo. Through the opposition’s filter, the prime minister has morphed into a Spanish nationalist anti-fantasy: a far-left Bolivarian nutjob, a crypto-separatist mate of Basque terrorists. Forget the other stuff his supporters crow about in his favour, this school of thought says – like the macroeconomy, his handling of the crises which have come his way, or the Iberian gas price exception – the really important thing here is that the prime minister has repeatedly relied on the votes of five members of parliament from a coalition part of which has links to a defunct terrorist group.

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.” 

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

As someone who works in the media, one of the most troubling aspects of the build-up to this campaign for me was the furore caused by an interview that the PP’s candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, gave to state broadcaster RTVE. In it, he was challenged by journalist Silvia Intxaurrondo over his claim that his party had always raised pensions in line with inflation (they hadn’t done so in 2012, 2013 and 2017). 

Núñez Feijóo doubled down, demanding that the journalist admit her error, before it emerged that the error was his. It was hard to detect much contrition in the tweet that followed: “I don’t mind clarifying any declaration if it has been inaccurate, not like Sánchez, whose arrogance would never allow it.” Hours later, PP MEP Esteban González Pons tweeted that RTVE was a “political party” which was “going to lose the elections”.

That line was echoed, temporarily, by fellow MEP José Manuel García-Margallo, who said he has “never seen in Spain or any other country the presenter of a programme providing data contradicting the person being interviewed”, a situation that turns the journalist into “judge and jury”.

And yet, if there has been one moment of genuine hope in this campaign, it came from García-Margallo himself. After being battered on Twitter for his comments, the former foreign minister made a correction (via a video on Twitter), that would have mystified Núñez Feijóo: “I was completely wrong, from top to bottom. Of course an interviewer can challenge or correct data given by an interviewer, without a doubt.”

He went on to give a detailed — and yes, very party political — explanation of why the PP had looked after pensioners better than the Socialists had. But it was heartening to view this old-school politico doing so in a way that involved eating a slice of humble pie.  

That, however, was an aberration, a glitch in Spain’s Matrix of polarisation. A few days later, González Pons, when asked by the BBC about possible worries in the EU about the PP governing with Vox, said: “The UK government is more right wing than Vox…what Brussels really wants is not to have any more communists in the government in Spain.”

“There is no greater monster than reason. That of course is the Spanish idea. You see. The idea of Quixote.”

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

As someone who is now technically Spanish I watch this election, with its almost unbelievable tribalism, with a worried eye. In his novels, McCarthy explored relentlessly the ambiguity of humanity – our ability to lurch from ordered civilisation to senseless barbarity, from clarity to confusion, wonder to horror. Spanish politics makes no such concessions, it is a world of frightening certainties. Who knows where they will lead us.