Tourists queue to enter the imposing 16th-century palace where Felipe II is said to have planned how the Armada would destroy Elizabethan England.
In the splendour of El Escorial, the king received the news of the defeat of the “invincible” fleet at the hands of the English navy, presaging the slow decline of Spain in centuries to follow.
The less grandiose surroundings of the nearby town could be about to bear witness to another fall: the collapse of the mainstream right in Spanish politics.
El Escorial falls under the Madrid regional government which, recent polls suggest, could be lost to the left after 24 years in the hands of the Popular Party (PP) when voters head for the polls in local, regional and European elections on Sunday.
A survey published today in El Pais suggests that the left will wrench Madrid, the biggest prize, from the clutches of the PP, which has controlled the capital for the past 24 years, while the new far-right Vox party is forecast to win about 9 per cent of the vote and 11 or 12 of the 129 seats in the regional assembly. The PP is projected to take only 27 seats, to the Socialists’ 33.
This imminent electoral humiliation is part of a pattern that has been repeated time and again in every sizeable European country over the past few years. These are dark days for the centre right.
“What we are now seeing with the PP is very obviously an example of a process that’s been happening across Europe,” Alexander Clarkson, a lecturer in European politics at King’s College London, said.
Each country has its own distinctive gripes and peculiarities but the broader trend seems to be largely inexorable. The Republicans in France and Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Liberty alliance in Italy are ghosts of their former selves.
In Britain, the Conservatives are expected to haemorrhage votes to the Brexit Party in this week’s European parliamentary election. Some observers think this could be a foretaste of their travails in a future general election.
Even in Germany, the home of what was once Europe’s last surviving big-tent centre-right party, the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian ally have brooked a series of electoral setbacks that ultimately prompted Angela Merkel to announce that she would retire from front-line politics.
The phenomenon may reach its symbolic apex on Sunday, when the European People’s Party, the conservative grand alliance that has ruled the European parliament since the days of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship, risks losing the dominant position it has held for two decades.
Experts are divided over the causes of this political rot. Some commentators, especially in Britain, argue that conservative and economically liberal forces have simply found no persuasive answer to the rise of the nationalist far right.
Others argue that one must look further back into modern history for an explanation. In Dr Clarkson’s view, a series of crises — first the dominance of “third way” social democrats such as Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, Mrs Merkel’s predecessor; then the financial crisis of 2008; and most recently the influx of migrants from north Africa and the Arab world in 2015 — have broken the movement in two.
According to this school of thought, what we call right-wing populism is not a new or extraneous force. It was always there, bound to the more pragmatic and centrist wing of conservatism in an inherently unstable coalition. That coalition has now been shattered.
“You have with the PP and Vox a very obvious case of a wider trend that you can also see with the Brexit Party in Britain, with the AfD in Germany, with the Lega (Matteo Salvini’s League) in Italy,” Dr Clarkson said.
“What were once elements of the right and centre right are breaking away because other elements made decisions to stay in power and beat the social democrats about ten years ago.”
As Margaret Thatcher once famously observed, the trouble with standing in the middle of the road is that you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides. Recent events are beginning to transmute this aperçu into prophecy.
Like many European conservatives, Pablo Casado, leader of the Spanish PP, has struggled to plot a steady course between the Charybdis of the centre left and the Scylla of insurgent populism.
In last month’s general election he disastrously swung his party right to try to offset the emergence of Vox, leading to the worst result in its 30-year history. He has now moved the party back to the centre, dismissing Vox as “far right”.
“In my judgment the way of ruling [by the PP] has put their individual interests above the common good. There have been cases of excess and abuse of power. People want another more progressive form of government,” Ángel Gabilondo, the Socialist candidate for Madrid, said.
Analysts say that a series of corruption scandals in Madrid, splits in the right with the arrival of Vox — which won 24 seats in the general election — and a gaffe-prone PP candidate, Isabel Ayuso, may help the Socialists to victory in the city.
“It is true that the right has been split between the PP, Citizens and now Vox, so the PP will never command the same hegemony it once enjoyed,” Pablo Simón, a political expert at the Carlos III University in Madrid, said.
El Escorial, a town of 18,000 inhabitants about 47km (28 miles) northwest of Madrid that makes its living from tourism, is a bellwether.
The end of the conservative hegemony here is emblematic of the political change that has been sweeping across Spain since two anti-corruption parties, the far-left Podemos and centre-right Citizens, emerged in 2015, amid a widespread perception that the political establishment, represented by the PP and Socialists, was out of touch.
As in Germany, Italy and France, the local centre right has a difficult time hawking its wares in an increasingly crowded marketplace. El Escorial used to be dominated by the two traditional parties. Now there are seven vying for power.
“People have rejected the big parties here because they do not feel that they represent their interests and it mirrors what is happening across Spain with mainstream parties losing out,” Blanca Súarez Lorca, 49, a physicist who worked at the European Space Agency before becoming mayor, said.
Cristina Carrión Nogal, 32, a product designer who helped her father to run the family restaurant, has swapped her allegiance from the PP to a local residents’ party called Neighbours of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, which controls the council with the help of other left-wing parties.
“I used to vote PP but now I am going to vote for the Vecinos [Neighbours] because they seem to have more of our local issues at heart. The PP has been dominant for too long but they were not doing a great job,” she said.
At the hustings, Carlota López Esteban, 40, the PP candidate, was handing out balloons and lollipops to children to try to convince their parents to return to support her party.
“It is going to be hard for us to get a majority as the vote is so split here between seven parties,” she conceded.
On a European level, there is no obvious way for the mainstream right to patch up its manifold fissures and resume its old mantle of inevitability.
The political landscape is not what it was 20 years ago. There are too many plausible competitors, too many divergent interests, too many tribes of angry voters coalescing around problems that cannot easily be solved with the conventional tools of government.
If there is a glimmer of hope for Europe’s conservatives, it can be found in Austria, whose centre-right chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, 32, hopes to win a crushing victory in a snap election this September, prompted by a corruption scandal that has engulfed his ultra-nationalist coalition partner, the Freedom party.
“Kurz has aggressively pushed back,” Dr Clarkson said. “But he is in a particularly Austrian environment that allows him to steal the clothes of the far right.”
Even so, the Freedom party is expected to cling on to many of its supporters and win roughly 15 per cent of the vote.
There is, it seems, an open wound at the heart of Europe’s conservative movement. It will not be healed lightly.
