Galicia turns on Europe

Nationalism in the north-west region of Galicia is the fastest growing political force in Spain. Once a marginal grouping of extremist hotheads, the Galician Nationalist Block (BNG) - working class, left wing and fervently Euro-phobic - doubled its support in March's general elections, and next year's regional polls could vault it into power.

The Block's leader, Xose Manuel Beiras, 60, has the thick-set rugged beauty of his remote homeland, wild silver curls and a Celtic scowl that could have been plucked from Braveheart's army. Of prosperous Galician stock, he is an economics professor at Santiago university. In 1972, he wrote what became the nationalists' bible: Economic Backwardness in Galicia. He became a regional MP in 1985.

He is also an accomplished political agitator whose explosive oratory has dynamised the region's dispossessed fishermen and small farmers. Long the scourge of the right-wing Manuel Fraga, Galicia's Prime Minister, Mr Beiras is subtly shifting tack with the aim of supplanting him. Having made his name as a rowdy spoiler, he is now presenting himself as an alternative.

"Nationalism in Galicia has always been on the left," he said, leaning on the bar of the region's elegant parliament building. "It's never been con- servative because unlike Catalonia or the Basque Country, there was never a Galician bourgeoisie. We never had any capitalist development to speak of, we're a peripheral, dependent economy. And that's why we never had influence in Madrid."

He talks of internal colonialism, dropping the names of mildly renowned Marxist economists, with the ponderous fluency of a 1968 revolutionary- turned-academic. Then he thumps his fist and his words tumble forth in a torrent.

"The European Union is the economic instrument of big transnational capital. It destroys regional productive specialities and imposes its own international division of labour. When we opposed entry, all the other parties called us troglo-dytes, catastrophists who wanted to hide Galicia behind a wall, but after Spain entered, people began to suffer sector by sector and they realised we were right."

He glared with intense blue eyes and heaved on a cigarette. "In a peripheral region like Galicia, the EU has destroyed practically everything and created nothing. Shipbuilding, deep-sea fishing, cattle farming, dairy farming, and small industry, all destroyed. We've lost our crucial productive sectors."

This, he says, is why the BNG's support is spreading from working class and small farmers to include traders, teachers, professionals and industrialists. And why the Block is stealing support from both the conservative Popular Party, and from "soft, de-caffeinated" socialists. Some members favour full independence, he says, but not through armed action.

Support for the PP in Galicia, Spain's most conservative region, has fallen steadily since Jose Maria Aznar formed his minority PP government in Madrid. Galicians see the Catalans and the Basques benefiting most, because Mr Aznar's needs their support to rule, and sense their own region marginalised again. Galicia is to hold regional polls next autumn, but Mr Fraga, undermined by surveys predicting that he will lose his majority, is being pressed to call them sooner.

Mr Beiras leans forward and rolls out pearls of realpolitik. "If the PP loses their absolute majority in the next [regional] elections, they have no allies. So automatically the Socialists and the BNG have between them an absolute majority. We want a deal with the Socialists as the only way of coming to power, otherwise we'd be supporting a right-wing minority government, and that would burn us for 20 years."