“We just considered the future,” said pensioners Carme and Manuel leaving the polling station in a mixed neighborhood in the historic center of Barcelona. “No, we did not vote with our traditional choices in mind, we only considered the future,” they repeated. Senior citizen Isidoro, her young niece and her boyfriend, both school teachers, all “voted for change”.
And change is what the Spaniards got. Not in terms, however, of a fresh possibility to see at least some ofthe disruptive policies all parties, excepting the incumbent, promised implemented. Some of these were changing an economic system that deepens inequality, putting an end to corruption, moving on over the two traditional parties that with time became so deeply entrenched with the political power system, and reassess the future for Spain as a nation-state after it showed to be unable to accommodate a regional push for independence.
On 20 December 2015, with an electoral system that favors the party that wins a majority and a turnout of a remarkable 73.2%, Spanish voters elected a rainbow parliament offering anything but an obvious government solution. Neither is it clear how the speakers of the House and the Senate will be elected in this unknown scenario with 13 parties, four of which got more than 40 representatives, but with no party coming close to the 176 seats needed for an absolute majority.
The Partido Popular cannot govern alone with its 123 seats. With 90 seats the Socialist Party “held ground”, but could form a government only with unlikely coalitions, or if they got at least other 11 parties to abstain. If Podemos, the alternative left aspiring to govern, abstained to favor the PSOE, which it calls part of the “caste”, it would do so turning its back to everything it said and campaigned for so far. In addition, albeit it did not overtake the PSOE, the Purple Party won 69 seats.
Ciudadanos, the emerging center-right, did worse than expected, but will still hold 40 seats. The rest of the rainbow is formed, to name a few, by Catalan pro-indpendence parties with the Catalan Republican Left’s 9 seats and the 6 of Democracia y Libertad, plus the 6 of the Basque local alliances with Podemos‒ all of them represented with such a high number of MPs in Madrid for the first time.
“Welcome to Italy” is one of the most heard and read comments all over the place in the media. The Spanish democracy grew mature and is now richer, but all it is offering is endless consultations and uncertainty over the next government.
It is unchartered territory for the Spanish people after almost 40 years of a regular two-party alternation, although the requiem for this system sounded already in May 2015 following the regional elections. The idea that at the end of the next two months there might not yet be a government because of just 7 percentage points is exactly the opposite of what the incumbent Mariano Rajoy boasted in Brussels about Spain’s political stability and his ability to keep financial markets calmlike, say, during the Greek crisis.
This election’s strong wording ‒ break/change or consolidate (pro-austerity and pro-market policies) ‒ gave way to weaker terms such as abstention and pacts. Like in Italy, commentators recalled, Madrid will have to get used to time passing without anything happening, to the new and sudden importance of micro-parties, to each parliamentary seat becoming worth gold and, worse still, to “fugitives” among parties.
The only way to form a government appears to be that all parties abstain on a Rajoy minority government “in the name of Spain, which comes before the single parties’ interests”, as Albert Rivera put it in an interview the day after the polls that are yielding” unpredictable consequences”. Ciudadanos’ leader stated the need for a sense of responsibility, also because the state budget was just passed and is awaiting implementation: [We need to show that] “we are not Greece,” he said. In order to allow the Pp, which Ciudadanos has been trying hard to defeat, to form a government,he is willing to ask his 40 MPs to abstain.
That the party that came in 4th may become a “fundamental axis at the center, beyond the old left and the old right and beyond circles and confluences”, as Rivera believes, is another new scenario.
Poor King: it is now up to Felipe VI, who ascended the throne in 2014 following the abdication of his father, King Juan Carlos I (who did so alsoto convey a message of national renewal), to give the mandate to form a government to the leader who has more chances to succeed, and not necessarily to who gained the most votes, according to the Constitution. (This means that in theory even the socialist Pedro Sanchez could be invited to try should he see any chance that more than 11 parties in the left with opposed different views on some crucial issues decided to support him coalescing or abstaining).
After 40 years of a period considered the most productive and positive in Spain’s modern history by about 13 million Spaniards against the 25 who voted, the risk is now that the push for fresh changesand progress will bogdown due to the impossibility of all parties to renege what promised, even if it were in the name of governability and to avoid new electionsin spring with an electoral law that many consider obsolete.
The Catalan question, which went from simmering to boilingin the last few years, was the straw that broke the camel’s back on December 20, because at least an initial solution is long due. In fact, the Catalan left thrived in the wake of the overall demand for change, not so the intransigent right.
Catalonia’s restlessness put an additional obstacle in the way of a deal, and would not be served by a minority government.The alternative option to a referendum would be an amendment of the Constitutionthat would make it capable of dealing with that kind of instances (and of guaranteeing the equality of all Spanish citizens as to living conditions, as theSocialists want, or of pohbiting revolving doors, as Podemos proposes). It goes without saying that a constitutional reform should not be rushed by a minority government, even if it is “the only way to defend democracy and the Constitution itself” (from cultural and historical singularities’ pressures), as jurist Javier Pérez Royo writes. In his authoritative view, reforming the Constitution is a prerogative of the democratic state.
Spain joined on Monday the club of those Mediterranean countries currently debating reforms of the Constitution and of the electoral law. In a year and a half France could be joining too. Some people asked about said that that came “as no consolation”. They had hoped that the holidays and a rise in consumption would give some respite from more serious problems, like job creation that is still way too slow.
“We just considered the future,” said pensioners Carme and Manuel leaving the polling station in a mixed neighborhood in the historic center of Barcelona. “No, we did not vote with our traditional choices in mind, we only considered the future,” they repeated. Senior citizen Isidoro, her young niece and her boyfriend, both school teachers, all “voted for change”.
And change is what the Spaniards got. Not in terms, however, of a fresh possibility to see at least some ofthe disruptive policies all parties, excepting the incumbent, promised implemented. Some of these were changing an economic system that deepens inequality, putting an end to corruption, moving on over the two traditional parties that with time became so deeply entrenched with the political power system, and reassess the future for Spain as a nation-state after it showed to be unable to accommodate a regional push for independence.
