Spanish politics, a spectator sport for our times. Sometimes terrifying, always entertaining

As a spectator sport, politics can be right up there with the most gripping. 

Sometimes, here in Spain, it feels like a gritty comedy drama. Sometimes, more like a bullfight. But it certainly isn’t dull.

The 28th of May, when local and regional elections took place, was a bad day for those of us out here who don’t much like the far right. Or even the less far right. The traditional party of the right, the Popular Party or PP, in alliance with the far right Vox (which means voice in Latin, a good name for that bunch of loudmouths) swept into office in town halls and regional assemblies across the country. For the PP, think of the US Republican Party before Trump. Vox is the Trump version. 

Those results painted a bleak picture for the centre-left government of the Socialist Party, the PSOE, and the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. It looked like the elections due before the end of the year were likely to see him out of a job. I just hoped he would be able to turn things around a bit over the few months the old parliament still had to run.

But then he astonished me. Instead of waiting he called a snap election in July. My immediate reaction was to think that he’d made a mistake, that it was too soon, that he could only be defeated if he went that early. But then I reminded myself that Pedro Sánchez constantly surprises everyone, constantly overturns any predictions made about him.

And this time he did it again.

It’s undeniable that he lost the July election. The PP won 137 seats to the PSOE’s 121. Sánchez had come second. On the other hand, against all expectations, he’d actually added one seat to his tally in parliament, at a time when everyone expected him to lose some.

Then there were his allies out to the left of the PSOE. A bunch of small parties organised in a group called ‘Unidas podemos’ (‘United we can’, with ‘united’ in the feminine – yep, that’s how with-it they were) had won 35 seats last time around. Now, with a new leader and reorganised as ‘Sumar’ (‘add up’), they took 31.

A relatively small loss but a loss all the same.

The problem is that there are 350 seats in the lower house of the Spanish parliament. To be absolutely sure of being able to form a government, a candidate for Prime Minister has to have the support of 176 MPs. 

If that’s not possible, a second round of voting takes place, in which it’s enough simply to get more MPs voting for you than voting against. The problem was that neither the PP with Vox, nor the PSOE with Sumar, could gather 176 votes, or even enough to outvote the other side if they all voted together.

That was remarkable, given that the PP had 137 seats. In the previous parliament, Vox held 52. All they had to do was hold or increase that number. The local and regional elections, in which they’d done so well, suggested they’d have no problem. That would give the PP-Vox coalition the votes it needed.

That was what made the election in July so extraordinary. Because far from growing its allotment of seats, or even holding its own, Vox collapsed, losing 19 seats to end up with 33. That meant that together with the PP’s 137, it would reach 170 and fall short of a majority by six.

Even with the support of two small parties with one MP each, they’d still be on 172. That wouldn’t quite get it over the line.

It’s up to the king to decide which party gets the first chance to try to put together a coalition that would allow it to lead a government. He perfectly sensibly called on the PP to have a go. The biggest party in parliament clearly deserved to try first. But no one expected them to pull off the trick, hated as they are by so many of the smaller parties – or at any rate, hated as is the presence of Vox in a potential coalition by almost all the other parties.

Once it became clear that the PP wasn’t going to succeed, the king, again perfectly properly, called on the PSOE instead. It makes sense, doesn’t it? You try the biggest single party first, and if that doesn’t work, you switch to the second biggest.

That’s when Sánchez astonished me again. He’s proved himself extraordinarily skilful at coalition building. 

With his 121 seats and the 31 of Sumar, he was on 152. 

The two Basque parties (left and right) with their eleven MPs and the (left-wing) Galician party with one, came on side, putting him on 164. 

Still far from enough. 

Sánchez needed the support of the two Catalan nationalist parties with seven MPS each. That’s ERC, the Left Republicans of Catalonia, and Junts per Cataluña, Together for Catalonia. The ERC was happy to back him. That put him on 171. But that meant he still couldn’t outvote the opposition, even if Junts abstained.

He needed both Catalan parties to vote with him. But their support came with a serious price tag. The leader of Junts and then President of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, had held an unauthorised referendum on Catalan independence on 1 October 2017. It had been attacked by police sent by the PP government of the time in Madrid, with serious violence, followed by the flight of some leading members of the party, including Puigdemont, abroad (those who stayed were gaoled). 

Junts and ERC wanted an amnesty for their colleagues in gaol or facing trial. And they wanted an official referendum.

It was clear that Sánchez would refuse the referendum. But he was prepared to move on amnesty. And I feel, why not? After all, these characters hadn’t done anything violent, no one had been killed by their calling the referendum, illegal or not, and I really couldn’t see how their actions merited a prison sentence.

Right wingers demonstrating against the Spanish Socialist Party

A lot of people in Spain, however, don’t see it that way. The right wing has been holding angry demonstrations outside the Socialist Party headquarters in Madrid. But many on the left are just as fed up. Spaniards are sensitive about anything that affects the integrity of the nation, and they find the behaviour of the organisers of the referendum far more reprehensible than I, as a mere Englishman, do.

That shows the courage of Sánchez. While sticking firmly to his refusal of a referendum, he agreed to put a bill to parliament providing the amnesty the Catalan parties wanted. They eventually agreed to accept that commitment as the price of their support, possibly in part because their vote has been falling in successive elections, and the alternative of another general election didn’t appeal to them.

So Sánchez got the seven MPs from Junts to back him too, taking him to 178. And then, to cap it all, he even persuaded the single MP from the Canaries Coalition, a right-winger who’d previously backed the PP-Vox attempt to form a government, to switch and support him instead.

So he ended up with 179 votes, a clear absolute majority, and has been re-elected for another term of Prime Minister.

Now, there’s a lot of hostility towards the amnesty. Of course, I feel the electorate can only blame itself. If it didn't want a compromise, coalition government, they should have given one party a majority. They elected a parliament that pushed Sánchez into this kind of concession. How can they blame him now?

Still, the question remains, whether the hostility to the amnesty will eventually do him serious harm. It’s hard to know. Spaniards can get passionate about their politics, as the demonstrations against the Socialist party show. But will they be able to keep it up? However passionate such movements are when they start, it’s hard to see them lasting for many months.

Interestingly, one of the symbols of those demonstrations is the Spanish flag with the royal coat of arms that normally sits in the middle, cut out. Why? Because by even inviting Sánchez to try to form a government, some of these demonstrators feel the king has betrayed the country.

The Spanish flag with the royal coat of arms cut out

That’s not limited to Vox people. Many on the right call what Sánchez has pulled off a ‘coup’. It was fascinating to see the president of the Madrid region, Isabel Ayuso, in the PP but on its hard right, calling for a response ‘golpe por golpe’. That’s a gloriously ambiguous demand. It can mean ‘blow for blow’, which would be fairly innocuous. But it can also mean ‘coup for coup’. Was she calling for an actual coup against Sánchez? And was that what upset the people who cut the coat of arms out of the flag – that the king hadn’t called out the army for a coup?

Intriguing times ahead. Sánchez faces terrible hostility. He heads a coalition that runs from Coalición Canaria on the right to Sumar on the left. The received wisdom is that it can’t last.

But that’s the thing about Sánchez. He keeps proving received wisdom foolish. It’s going to be fascinating to watch what happens in the coming months and years.

Spanish politics is going to remain a remarkable spectator sport for a while yet.

Spanish politics wishing us all a Happy New Year

Two pieces of news, out here in Spain, have struck me as the old year dies. They provide insight into how to form governments and just how much, or how little, we need them.

The first is that the country is about to have a fully constituted government again, rather than one that is in office merely in an acting capacity.

Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias
Eight months to learn that compromise works better than intransigence

This is a bigger achievement than you might at first think. There were elections back in April, which led to the Spanish Socialist Party, the PSOE, winning 123 parliamentary seats under its leader Pedro Sánchez. That made it the biggest single party while leaving it well short of the 176 required for a majority, but then the left wing Unidas-Podemos (UP), the party that broke spectacularly onto the scene a few years ago under the leadership of the charistmatic radical Pablo Iglesias, also had 42 and the centrist Citizens Party had 57. Surely a majority government could emerge, even without having to call on Catalan or Basque nationalists, some of whom would be inclined to favour the left.

That was not to be. First the Citizens Party made it clear that it was centrist in name only. Under no conditions would it support Sánchez into office. So if there was any sense in which it stood in the centre, it was with a powerful inclination to the right.

Months of negotiations between PSOE and UP made little progress, as neither side was prepared to budge from its entrenched positions. The result was that just seven months after the first election, a second had to be called, in November.

The results were highly educational.

The Citizens Party, which had been so outspoken in its refusal to work with the PSOE, was crushed. Its tally of MPs fell from 57 to just ten. Clearly, voters felt that if the party was going to ally itself only with the conservative Popular Party (PP), then it was just another conservative party and they might just as well vote directly for it. And indeed the PP went from a historic low of 66 to 89 MPs, although the collapse of the pseudo-centrists also had a far more serious consequence: the far-right Vox went from 24 seats to 52, making the third biggest group in the new Parliament. That’s a worrying development for the future.

As for the PSOE and UP, the two parties who couldn’t agree a programme after the April election, clearly voters didn’t like their behaviour. Both lost seats, though the PSOE not that many, falling from 123 to 120. UP, on the other hand, lost 7 which, considering they held just 42, is a much more serious blow.

The punishment handed to the two main parties of the left seems to have had the desired effect. Sánchez and Iglesias have at last found a way of agreeing a programme, including some interesting measures such as increased taxes on high pensions, legislation on euthanasia and climate change, and a reduced role for religious studies in public education.

With the abstention of the left-wing nationalists in Catalonia, which seems highly likely, it now appears that Sánchez will at last go from being acting Prime Minister to being confirmed in the role some time next week.

The message is clear. Pull together on the left and you can achieve some things. Reject all compromise and the voters punish you.

What about the other piece of news?

It seems that the Spanish stock market index, Ibex, ended 2019 up by more than in any year in 2013. Now I know that the position of the stock market is far from a perfect indication of the state of an economy, but it’s nonetheless generally the case that if the economy does badly, stocks and shares fall too. So the news about the Spanish index does somewhat suggest that the economy’s not doing too badly.

So my first bit of news teaches me that a compromise is worth making to get a government that can do some good, a lesson we’d do well to learn on the British left. The second shows that an economy can do fine even without a government for eight months, a lesson, in relativising the importance of government itself, it wouldn’t be bad for every nation to learn.

And on that note, I wish you all a great New Year.