Spain has put 23,000 police on the road to deal with a truckers’ strike, the largest deployment against a strike in the country’s history, according to the World Socialist Web Site, which sided with the strikers in its account of the dispute.
By the time of its March 25 report, 75,000 drivers belonging to the Platform for the Defense of Road Transport of Merchandise had been on an indefinite nationwide strike for two weeks. Their demand: stable fuel prices, as costs climb worldwide while NATO countries threaten to cut off Russian fuel exports during the war in Ukraine. The stoppage, the report said, has cut supplies to factories, industrial farms and supermarkets and cost Spanish companies billions of euros.
Police and arrests
The outlet described armed police cars and helicopters escorting non-striking drivers to deliver goods to supermarkets and industrial plants. It said police assaulted strikers on picket lines, shot and wounded one trucker, arrested more than 60 people and fined hundreds. Those claims come from the outlet alone, and the text gives no official response to them.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was reported to be weighing fuel subsidies while declining to negotiate with the Platform. He has acknowledged that sanctions on Russia “will have a cost and require sacrifices,” and that they will logically weigh on family budgets.
The government’s line
Ministers have been blunt. Transport Minister Raquel Sánchez refused to meet the Platform, calling the strike “enormous irresponsibility” and describing the group as “a minority group encouraged by the extreme right and anti-democratic groups.” The Platform has said it has no ties to the far-right Vox party, which has voiced support for the strike.
Finance Minister María Montero accused the truckers of “playing the game of Putin.” Félix Bolaños, the minister of the presidency, called them “an ally of instability, and that is what Putin would like.”
Two unions also turned on the strikers. The CCOO and UGT issued a joint statement describing them as “violent groups” and arguing that, because the Platform includes small businesses, the action is a business stoppage that labor law does not protect. In Extremadura, one of the regions hit hardest, CCOO general secretary Encarna Chacón compared the strike to France’s yellow vest protests. “In Spain we cannot be like France was with the ‘yellow vests’,” she said. The union, she added, “has never defended wildcat strikes, nor are we ever going to defend them.”
Public mood
The outlet cited polls finding that 68 percent of Spaniards do not support involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and that 86 percent are “quite” or “very” afraid of the war’s effect on prices. It also reported that Sanchez has pledged to raise the defence budget by €10 billion to €25 billion per year.
Truckers in Germany, Greece, Italy and France have likewise held strikes or go-slow actions over fuel prices, the report said.
