Part of this centrepiece phone-in show, Línea Directa, is dedicated to local issues, and the rest to the bigger picture: it might be events in Andalusia, or a discussion of Palestine. The inspiration sometimes cited is Aló Presidente, the late Hugo Chávez’s unscripted talk show, in which he addressed the Venezuelan people at length. In the studio itself, there were chairs set out for the studio audience – although the programme is not the most visual of feasts, usually confined to a static camera on Sánchez Gordillo. Initially the programme lasted three hours, and the production team had to carefully explain to him that this might need cutting down a bit. Sometimes Sánchez Gordillo reads his poetry directly to the camera, intercut with footage of El Humoso’s pastoral idyll. The poetry embroiders familiar themes; indeed, he has got into trouble with his critics for lines like ‘the right is verily Satan in flesh and blood’.
In my residence the TV was almost always on in the living room, and my host Antonio would occasionally let me flick over from his heavy diet of comically overblown Latin American telenovelas to watch a bit of Marinaleda TV. It was usually a series of short clips of recent activities, protests, or information about upcoming sporting activities – register for next month’s youth table tennis tournament! That kind of thing. If you live in Marinaleda, you can’t really avoid being on TV – if you go on demos, or out during festivals, you’ll be filmed.
One fifteen-minute segment recorded the visit of a blue-haired Argentinian hippy, who had come to give the village pensioners a session of New Age dance and physical interaction in the pavilion. Soft music played as she encouraged them to awkwardly stroke each other’s faces. This programme sticks in my memory because of Antonio’s helpless laughter at the evident discomfort of the participants, his friends and neighbours. Next was a short segment about the recent occupation of empty government farms in Somonte – a big story for SAT, and hence for Marinaleda, accompanied by a medley of Spanish punk and funk. Finally, they filled time with a montage of some women in the vegetable processing factory impassively piling up roasted peppers, de-seeding them, and generally working the production line, accompanied by the blissed-out reggae of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘I Can See Clearly Now’. It was more than a little surreal. When they ran out of material for the day, the channel synced up with the sepia-tinged broadcasts of Cubavisión Internacional, the international offshoot of Cuban state TV.
As propaganda it’s pretty small-scale, low-impact stuff, although the range is about fifty kilometres, potentially reaching 60,000 viewers including Estepa, Écija and Osuna. They don’t have any viewing figures for inside or outside the village, however. The station is often regarded with irritation in neighbouring villages for blocking other channels; on more than one occasion Spanish state prosecutors have begun legal proceedings because of the station’s signal-squatting, piggy-backing on the frequencies owned by other, bigger stations, including, rumour has it, the Disney Channel.
There’s an informational function to some of the output. The radio and TV stations are used to mobilise for upcoming demonstrations and land occupations, along with the union website, telephone chains, and neighbourly word-of-mouth. But for the most part, the content consists of trailers for life in the village, reminders of what ‘we’ stand for – which hits at that same issue of plurality in the village, or the lack of it. Paco Martos, the bright young guy I’d met on the coach to Malaga, one of the media hub’s few full-time employees, was unapologetic about the fact they share a world-view with Marinaleda’s Ayuntamiento: they may agree, but the significant thing is, he insisted, they don’t take instruction from them.
There is, and has always been, one overwhelming problem for right-wing or liberal depictions of Marinaleda as a grotesque, demagogic dictatorship: Sánchez Gordillo keeps on winning elections. Again, and again, and again. He does so neither by slender, contestable margins, nor by margins so implausible that you’d be minded to send in UN election observers. As the crisis slowly saps all remaining credibility from the major parties, the rightist Popular Party (PP) and PSOE, Marinaleda is a jewel in the crown for IU, the coalition of left parties to which the CUT and Sánchez Gordillo belong.
Spanish local council elections are decided via a proportional share of the vote and use a party-list system, where you put your chosen party’s piece of paper in an envelope, and that envelope in the ballot box: so the more votes IU receives, the more people on its list of candidates get elected. During the March 2012 local election, as the count proceeded in the Centro de Adultos, they would dramatically unfurl each anonymous ballot one by one, the Gordillistas in the room cheering each vote for IU. The mayor’s supporters would dash out of the small classroom into the courtyard whenever IU had amassed enough votes for another councillor – ‘We’ve got seven!’ ‘Now we’ve got eight!’ – to huge cheers each time.
In a village where your political affinities (and their associated colour schemes, flags, heroes and icons) are held to be so important, election campaigns are periods of excitement, albeit rather one-sided excitement. The mayor’s face appears on posters plastered all over the village, hanging from people’s windows, and even strung as bunting across Avenida de la Libertad. It’s a context in which the only real decision is whether to continue with Sánchez Gordillo, and the CUT/IU, and the project, or not – and if you choose the latter, you don’t go around shouting about it. The old ladies of Marinaleda, some of the most loyal Gordillistas, have been known to approach newcomers to the village with a sweetly sincere explanation of how elections work, and have always worked: ‘You will vote for el alcalde, won’t you? You know you have to vote for el alcalde?’
Elections are free and ultimately fair, but in practice, they are a time to reaffirm commitment to the project. Sánchez Gordillo delivers lengthy orations from platforms about what they have achieved through struggle over the years, and what they will achieve next, and is re-elected comfortably. The glossy sixty-four-page 2011 CUT/IU election booklet, given to me when I first met Sánchez Gordillo in January 2012, and whipped out again by Rafa the librarian when I told him I was looking into the history of the village, is a first-class piece of propaganda, not least because it succeeds in the main aim of all Sánchez Gordillo arguments and propaganda: to conflate the idea of his project with the village as a whole, as one indistinguishable entity. Marinaleda is the project, rather than the village in which it has unfolded.
In those May 2011 elections, Sánchez Gordillo’s CUT/IU faced rumours the village might finally be slipping away to the PSOE – they had seen their vote fall from 71 per cent in 2003 to 61 per cent in 2007, and the PSOE claimed four of Marinaleda’s eleven council seats. ‘Alarm bells are ringing,’ wrote one supporter of Sánchez Gordillo at the time. Perhaps the young people of the village were fed up with this archaic communist rhetoric? Perhaps the PSOE could exploit a burgeoning desire to move on from the mayor’s obsession with working the land? The PSOE campaigned dirtily, using xenophobic populism, blaming illegal immigrants for the lack of work in Andalusia, and it failed spectacularly: CUT/IU won back their 9–2 majority on the council, winning 73 per cent.