"The creation of IU was a defeatist reading of 28-O"

Professor Santiago Carrillo Menéndez (Paris, 1950) acts as executor of his father's political memory and lived by his side for much of his career in the PCE, of whose central committee he was a member.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
22 October 2022 Saturday 23:33
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"The creation of IU was a defeatist reading of 28-O"

Professor Santiago Carrillo Menéndez (Paris, 1950) acts as executor of his father's political memory and lived by his side for much of his career in the PCE, of whose central committee he was a member. In 1982, when the fate of the party was sealed – he had 23 seats and remained in 4 minutes–, Santiago was 32 years old.

That of October 1982 was an unprecedented victory for the left and at the same time a very bitter pill to swallow for the PCE.

Of course it was a very bitter result, but it cannot be said that it was a surprise. The PCE was already in a deep crisis, which had led in the spring to the resignation of the general secretary, withdrawn at the almost unanimous request of the members of the leadership. A period is opening in which, on the one hand, there is the joy of a change and a leftist government, and on the other hand, the sadness that in this process, the party is in the process of dissolution and plunged into a great crisis. .

There is a certain historical ingratitude that day with his father, so active in the underground and transition.

There is. And so the rest of us perceive it. But my father was not used to thinking in those categories. For my father it was a setback, he had to learn lessons, reorganize, continue fighting and recompose himself for the next one. He thought that the government always brings wear and tear and that if you were capable of making a sensible opposition, it would bear fruit. He never started from other considerations.

How much did that 28-O have to do with the subsequent transition of the PCE towards the United Left?

I think it is completely conditioned by that result. The PCE was in crisis, simply the elections are a confirmation and an accelerator. The creation of Izquierda Unida basically corresponds to a defeatist reading of the electoral result and to trying to mount the campaign against NATO, where a certain rebirth of the mobilization is seen. In my opinion it was a mistake because, although it was a great mobilization, it failed and then in some way it already marked what was being tried to create. In that debate, the sector that my father headed within the PCE was in favor of rethinking the discourse, but reaffirming acronyms and signs of identity. And those of us who were members of the Central Committee opposed it. We lost that battle in that period. And if you look at it with a bit of perspective, even at her best, IU fell short of the solo PCE result in 79.

The results of 1982 are twenty months after the coup. Did his father link one thing to the other?

Yes of course. The Communist Party had suffered a belated legalization followed by a contrary pronouncement from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The party was seen as a possible reason for the military uprising. The 23-F in some way is a reaffirmation of that and could have contributed to the defeat, but it would be a mistake to think that it was the main reason or the only reason.

In that rise of social democracy and crisis of the communist parties, what did the situation of the PCE have in common with the fate of other European formations?

There is a fundamental element if one compares, for example, with the exit of the Second World War, where the prestige of the Soviet Union is enormous and makes the communist parties, which have been the central axis of the resistance, benefit from it . We have a period in ebb of that prestige.

Today the invasion of Ukraine seems to have awakened old red-brown and Russophile temptations in the post-communist left.

I believe that what happens in crises is a sharpening of all the contradictions and if there is no capacity for new thinking and analysis, it is very easy to fall back on approaches from the past. And that explains a bit that resurgence to which he alludes. But it is a fallacy to treat reality with simplistic models that do not lead to an understanding and a capacity to transform reality. On the Russian issue, I think there are still many on that left who have not realized that Putin and Russia today is not communism, they are the friends of the LePens and other fur animals of the extreme right.