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.