Features editor, Fred Taylor, discusses the results of the Spanish general election and offers an insight into its causes and consequences.
In 2019, Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias embarked on a four year coalition project. Their objective? To grow Spain in an egalitarian manner, as their official plan stated: “we will progress together in a united fashion, leaving nobody behind”. Four years, a pandemic, a major war and a fuel crisis later, Sánchez has accomplished what he promised. The only person he left behind was his coalition partner Pablo Iglesias, who left politics in 2021. Spain is undoubtedly in a better place than it was four years ago: ‘Sánchismo’ works. As the spokesperson of Sánchez’s party PSOE boasted in the pre-election debates: “the reality is that Spain has the fastest growing economy in Europe, four times greater than the average. The reality is that this economy has created more jobs than ever in Spain’s history. The reality is that we have the lowest energy bills in Europe”. He could have continued, the Spanish government has conquered Sunak’s greatest foe of high inflation with an indefatigable ease, with the current rate being 1.9%, a number Brits, Germans and Italians can only dream of. It has also massively cut the unemployment rate, a problem that has plagued Spain’s rural areas for the last fifty years.
Having read this, you may be surprised that the Spanish right wing surpassed Sánchez’s party in the election which took place last Sunday. What did the opposition offer that was better than accomplished economic gains?
The first thing to note is that Spanish people didn’t feel all the economic progress that the government made. The four years PSOE were in government were underlined by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Spain, like all other countries, had to combat the post-Covid scarcity and high fuel prices that were present at these times. Despite eventually being reduced, inflation reached 10% in Spain and was higher than usual for around a year. The compounding effect of this means that prices are still much higher than they were in 2019. The government’s work on increasing the employment rate, increasing the minimum wage and reducing inflation failed to do the impossible task of magically producing fuel during an energy crisis or goods during the period of global supply chain disruption. As such, a portion of the Spanish electorate was unconvinced of the economic progress the government had made.
Going further, the recent history of Spain gives us another reason why Spaniards are hesitant to support the social democratic government. Spain has always been an autochtonously diverse nation. Anyone who has travelled round the Iberian country will know that the paella-eating Valencians living on the Costa Blanca have very different lifestyles to the farmers and fishermen in rainy Galicia. They also speak different languages: Spain has 7 government recognised languages and around 20% of its native population don’t speak Spanish as their mothertongue.
The Basque country in the north of Spain sits at the pinnacle of Iberian diversity, having a culture and language which bears almost no resemblance to the Spanish ones. During Franco’s dictatorship, after years of complete suppression of the Basque language and culture, a terrorist group named ETA was born with the objective of forming a sovereign Basque state. Initially, they used rogue, violent methods with the objective of taking down Franco’s regime. When Spain transitioned to a democracy in 1977, this did not come with the possibility of Basque self-determination, so the group’s work continued. During Franco, the Basques, and much of liberal Spain, empathised to some degree with ETA’s violent tactics. When Spain became a democracy, their terrorism was no longer seen in the same light. Notably, in 1987, ETA blew up a supermarket in Barcelona, killing twenty-five civilians. People were outraged. Any sympathy the group had was lost. The almost entirety of Spain condemned this barbarism as America did Al Qaeda in the early 2000s. Even representatives of the political wing of the group felt personally obliged to condemn the images of women and children dead and wounded. That political wing, called Batasuna, was banned in 2013, and its members flocked to EH Bildu, one of the parties whose votes enabled Sánchez’s four years of power. While the party has been partially successful in distancing its brand from ETA, elements remain. For instance, its leader, Arnaldo Otegi, was an ETA terorrist, who was sentenced to six years in jail for kidnapping a Basque businessman in the 1980s. In the 2023 local elections, the party fielded 44 candidates who used to be members of the terrorist organisation. Right wing media in Spain still call Bildu the political wing of (the now defunct) ETA and while Bildu’s policies do not at all reflect the violence and barbarity of the terrorist organisation, their image still has the fingerprints of ETA all over it.
In the North-East of Iberia, many Catalan people had similar yearnings for independence. Faced with the same lack of self-determination as the Basques, they opted for a different, mostly peaceful solution. On 1 October 2017, the Catalan government illegally held a referendum for independence. The ‘Yes’ vote won, on a low turnout. For a couple of weeks, Spain was in disarray. One of its most prosperous regions had illegally decided to leave and the regional government was set on bringing the referendum’s result to fruition. This was the nation’s worst constitutional crisis since the creation of Spanish democracy 45 years ago and threatened the “indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation” critical to the definition of Spain given in the second article of the constitution. After the Catalan President briefly declared independence, several Catalan leaders were imprisoned and the President went into exile. The Spanish government then imposed direct control on the region. Just two years later, Sánchez made a deal with the separatists who were part of this government, and whose leader was in jail for trying to break up Spain, to ensure his election as President. Two years after that, as part of the agreement he made, he freed the Catalan leaders who had been imprisoned.
You can probably now understand why some Spanish voters had a qualm with Sánchez’s government. Even in Britain, Labour is scared to make deals with the SNP, and a Labour-Sinn Fein partnership would be completely off the cards. Many voters, especially older ones who still felt the fearful wrath of ETA, thought that Bildu was a party controlled by cold-blooded terrorists and saw the Catalan separatists as participants in a coup, due to their attempted illegal breakup of Spain.
Despite all this, the election results did not exactly present a clear defeat for Sánchez’s left-wing coalition. Firstly, in a sharp contrast to the rest of Europe, where the far-right have experienced growth in recent elections, 20 representatives of the Spanish far-right (Vox) lost their jobs on Sunday night.
The reasons for Vox’s demise are clear. While their stances on immigration and national unity resonate with voters, the party has a darker side, which almost everybody in Spain finds ugly and uninviting. Since 2019, when Vox first got into power at a regional level, it was these darker policies which they put into place. These policies were in their manifesto, however they were largely concealed during the campaign as policies with a broader appeal took prominence. In Castilla y León, the party controversially tried to limit abortion rights. In the Valencian Community, the regional vice-leader’s first action on entering government was to deny the existence of gender-based violence. Vox learned the rather easy lesson that while denying rights of those from abroad may gain you votes, denying the rights of half of the voting population is bound to hurt your chances.
This somber record also hurt the PP, the centre-right party who were the main challengers to Sánchez. Despite promises that they would not form a coalition with Vox if they won the election, their track record of doing so at the regional level alongside the lack of any other feasible path to governance, meant that voters did not truly believe them. The shadow of a far-right party which has used their time in government to target women’s and gay rights, has severely damaged the PP, who try to present themselves as one-nation conservatives. They have found it impossible to present a coalition with Vox to the mainstream and have also struggled to convince people that they could govern without Vox.
Sánchez, on the other hand, did a much better job of managing the image of his radically left-wing coalition partner. Four years ago, Unidas Podemos, the party he originally formed a government with, did not have a much better image than Vox. The far-left wing party was itself a coalition between the Maduro-supporting Spanish Communist Party and other organisations on the fringes of the Left. Sánchez saw this problem and swooped in. He called early elections in 2023, placing pressure on the left, which at the time was split into two different organisations, to unite. This pressure led to the far-left forming a coalition under a more presentable banner, with the leadership of the popular Yolanda Díaz. While the substance of her policies stayed true to the left, Díaz is a good politician, who knows how to present the left as a viable force for voters. One of her first moves as leader was to ensure that left-wing ideologues, such as Irene Monteros, who are popular to very few outside the party membership, were not included in the party’s platform. She sees her job within the left as inspiring voters who are disillusioned with the establishment PSOE. Díaz’s party (Sumar) has more or less acknowledged that their role is to complement PSOE, while Podemos saw their role as pushing PSOE further to the left. In debates preceding the election, Díaz and Sánchez would gang up on other candidates, almost never criticising each other- their unity was beyond question.
Sánchez did various other successes too. From the start of the campaign he presented a clear, understandable message which he stuck to despite initial bad polling. He would explain all the good his government had done, and then propose new measures that they would put into place over the coming four years. The right struggled to find an effective tactic to combat this. The far-right Vox argued that the positive statistics that PSOE were talking about were made-up, which is an immediately self-defeating argument, and the PP could do nothing except talk about the people that enabled the change, the Catalan and Basque separatist parties. Their talking points on the economy were equally weak. They mentioned that Spanish GDP had barely grown during Sánchez’s four years, however, the Spanish economy grew 5.5% last year as part of a solid bounce back from Covid, especially when compared to just 2.6% in France and 1.8% in Germany. The fact that the four year image of financial records were heavily influenced by Covid and the war in Ukraine ended up penetrating the minds of most Spaniards by the time of the election.
Ultimately, however, Sánchez has held unpopular positions during his four years as Spanish premier. He made deals with separatists, he freed politicians who had, in recent memory, tried to break Spain into two and he reformed the Spanish penal code, removing penalties he deemed disproportionate and bringing it in line with the rest of Europe. This was a pragmatic move towards reforming Spain’s authoritarian past but it was at odds with public opinion. Another controversy was the far-left initiated consent reform, which adopted an almost unworkable definition of consent that they had to back down from. Moreover, in the 2019 elections, the right-wing votes were split amongst three parties. Since then, one of these parties has practically ceased to exist, so the votes were now split amongst two, which gave the right an advantage from the get go. Finally, as mentioned earlier, Sánchez has governed during the worst worldwide economy in recent years.
PSOE overcame these barriers and managed to gain seats in the general election. This should be seen as a huge success for the Spanish left, as Sánchez now has a semi-feasible path to another four years in power. Calling a second set of elections will also play into his hands, as they would occur on the back of Sánchez rejecting a deal with Catalan separatists, shutting down criticism that he is too closely associated with them. Spain has broken the trend of the European expansion of the far-right and Sánchez has provided a guidebook for enabling progressive policies in Europe. Another four years of Sanchismo will do wonders for Spain.
