For most of its existence the Spanish party system has been dominated by the Socialist Party, PSOE, and the People’s Party, PP. Accordingly, and somewhat unusually in Europe, the governments tended to be based on a single party. However, parties have been repeatedly forced to cooperate in parliament and since 2020 they must share office in government. This change is obviously related to the fact that recently new actors have appeared on the scene, challenging the center-right and the center-left.
This podcast between Zsolt Enyedi and Fernando Casal Bértoa discusses inter-party relations in Spain. Fernando Casal Bertoa is Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham and the co-director of the Research Center for the Study of Parties and Democracy.
Zsolt Enyedi: Fernando, let’s start with the introduction of the Spanish party landscape.
Fernando Casal Bértoa: In Spain we have two main parties, the center-left PSOE and the culturally conservative and economically liberal People’s Party. Traditionally we used to have a third important party, the Eurocommunist United Left, but they are now part of the alliance Sumar. Until the last election the relatively new, radical-left populist Podemos was also a relevant actor. Another new party is the radical-right, Christian-Democratic, Spanish nationalist Vox. At the regional level, especially in the historical regions of Galicia, the Basque Country and Catalonia, further parties exist.
To the extent can we group the parties into blocs, or clusters? Are the boundaries between the blocs solid? Can parties and politicians move between these blocs and create new ones?
The period before 2015 was characterized by ‘bipartidism’, but since then we indeed need to speak about two blocs, as we do in the book we published together. The leftist bloc includes the Socialist party and the radical leftist parties that constitute the Sumar alliance. The right-wing bloc now consists of the People’s Party and Vox, but before 2023 Ciudadanos belonged here too. To answer your question, it is very difficult to move between these blocs. They exist
as parallel blood vessels, the loss of one party within the bloc is the gain of another.
To use Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair’s terminology, the electoral volatility is more within the blocs than between the blocs. In other words, citizens tend to move within the blocs but not between them. Take the elections that happened on 18 February in Galicia, my region. The nationalist, leftist and pro-independence Galician party BNG became the second strongest party, the Socialists suffered heavy losses, but if you add up the two, plus Sumar, you will get basically the same percentage as received four years ago by the Socialists, BNG, and Podemos. At this time the supporters of the Socialist party voted strategically for BNG, but have not moved to the right-wing bloc.
Remaining for a second on the topic of yesterday’s election, if I understand well the nationalists or regionalists, I am not even sure what is the right term…
They are pro-independence nationalists, even Trotskyists…
… they cannot get into power, at the regional level, without cooperation. Therefore, I wonder: to what extent are they trying to forge some kind of alliance prior to the election with the other leftist parties?
During this campaign you had the feeling that the principal candidate of the Socialist Party was not their own leader, the leader of the Socialist Party in Galicia, but the leader of the BNG. The two parties were united in their desire to defeat PP. And this collusion occurs in some other regions as well, even if these parties don’t create formal coalitions.
Returning to the national level, how are the campaigns typically structured? Are they structured around the alliances of parties or around the competition of autonomous parties?
The latter. Even in cases like the discussed Galician election where we knew that the Socialists and BNG would govern together, they still organized separate campaigns. The autonomy of the political parties prevails.
Countries differ from each other in the degree of inter-party cooperation partly due to the differences in their institutional setup. Now, if you consider Spain and you look at the political institutions there, particularly the electoral system (the D’Hondt rule, the closed list, the proportional system, and the 3% threshold) asymmetric bicameralism, or the personalized and open list partial bloc voting system for the Senate, would you say that these features encourage or discourage cooperation?
The open list system for the Senate doesn’t have much effect. It allows people to vote for individuals, but in reality they vote for parties. If there is an institutional effect, I would say that it is rather discouraging for cooperation. This is especially the case in big, proportional electoral districts where the system has more proportional effects. Theoretically, in smaller districts parties are under pressure to cooperate, but because it is a matter of prestige for the parties to have candidates in all districts, this cooperation typically doesn’t materialize.
I guess this means that even if there is some kind of convergence of interests, it is quite rare that parties would lend money, campaign infrastructure, media, or any other resources to each other.
It is rare. At the national level there were a few prominent examples of electoral cooperation, which were all minimalistic. In 2016 an electoral coalition was formed between the communist United Left and Podemos. But this cooperation brought no extra seats and it resulted in losing one million votes. The other case was the alliance between the Communists and the Socialists in 2000. The Communists pledged to support the Socialists in government and the two parties coordinated their campaigns in 27 electoral districts for the Senate. The two leaders appeared together at some campaign rallies. But they agreed only on a few common policies, leaving their different individual programs intact, and the result was disastrous – the People’s Party got an absolute majority for the first time ever. A third case was the formation of a coalition for the Senate in 2000, repeated in 2004 and in 2008, between the Socialists, the Communists, and the radical-left Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya that was quite successful.
Then there are examples of cooperation at the regional level. In 1999 the Catalan Communists and the Socialist party formed an electoral coalition and defeated the all-powerful Convergència orCiU. More recently, in 2015, the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and Junts, the right-nationalist party, formed an electoral bloc and they won the regional elections, but they were able to govern only with the support of the anti-systemic, leftist CUP. This cooperation proved to be highly consequential – CUP radicalized the other parties. CiU, the moderate nationalist right, broke up and the traditional Catalan party system collapsed. And this is one of the reasons the referendum on 17 October became possible.
One may also mention the case of cooperation between Podemos and the various local-regional parties that came out of the Indignados movement in 2015. This was a case of outcasts coming together. And finally, there was the case of Galeusca during the 2004 European Parliament campaign, an alliance between various regionalist parties, the nationalist Basque party, and BNG.
In those instances when there is pre-electoral cooperation, do you see any intention on behalf of the leaders of the cooperating parties to interfere with the internal matters of the other party to try to influence who will be the leader there or in any other way?
No, not really.
Traditionally parties have autonomy, and this is respected.
Perhaps the most recent and the most interesting case of influence was the creation of Sumar with the support of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, with the intention of boosting the standing of his Vice President, Yolanda Diaz, and also seeing that Unidas Podemos, which was the coalition between the Communist United Left and Podemos, was doing very badly in the polls. This was perhaps the most interesting case of a party trying to help another party.
Indeed, I would say that this sounds like a quite remarkable example. If I understand well, the leader of one party created another party, who may then become a rival….
I wouldn’t say he created the party, but he certainly encouraged it and used the friendly media to boost the image of the Vice President.
Let’s focus now a bit on the last national election, the one that was held in 2023. What was the role of party-cooperation in that particular election?
The clearest example of cooperation was the creation of Sumar that brought together all the parties to the left of the Socialist Party. This was an electoral coalition with considerable autonomy for the individual parties. For example, Podemos made a threat to Sanchez that they will not support his investiture as Prime Minister. Of course, this was an empty threat because the alternative was a right-wing government. The autonomy of parties is reflected also in the fact that Podemos later left Sumar.
Another relevant phenomenon is the collaboration of the People’s Party and Vox. Their cooperation materialized at the regional level after the May 2023 regional elections, prompting Sanchez’s decision to call for the early national elections that happened two months later. The possibility of a PP-Vox coalition then shaped the Catalonian vote during the national elections because nationalist voters voted for the Socialists in order to make a PP-Vox government impossible and this possibility also helped to mobilize Socialist voters in other regions.
How do you see the prospects of a Vox-PP cooperation at the national level. Let me just add that I’m asking partly because I think this is a big question for Europe as a whole in the sense that, in many other countries, the right-wing voters faced a dilemma: either there is a cooperation between the center-right and the radical-right or the left governs. What will happen in Spain if, at the next election, PP doesn’t have 50% + 1? Will they go into government with Vox?
In Spain, contrary to other European countries, the center-right has no other option. As we have seen,
the Socialists will get together with anyone: Communists, independentists whose leader is prosecuted for high treason, former terrorists, anyone.
The only option that the People’s Party has is to have a government with the support of Vox. As an important sign of readiness to cooperate, Vox supported the People’s Party when the king nominated Feijóo to be Prime Minister. Spain is different from countries where the Social Democrats and the Conservatives can cooperate, as happened in Germany in order to stop the radical-right from getting into government. This is impossible in Spain. The Conservatives proposed to the Socialists to share the office consecutively, two years – two years, but the Socialists rejected the offer. So, PP has no other choice, and Vox has no other choice either – they must support PP because otherwise the Socialists will govern.
In this regard the elections on 18 February in Galicia carry an important message. In that campaign Vox criticized not only the left but also the PP and its regional leader, Rueda.
Without much success…
It was a complete disaster. They got 2.2%, just 0.2% more than in the previous election. The same applies to Madrid, where they attacked PP and as a result lost support. They need to reconsider their strategy. This is also an issue of internal matters. The party used to have various factions, but the more liberal members were expelled and a very conservative faction dominates now.
When Vox started it wasn’t radical-right, but then they built alliances with people like Orbán, Le Pen, and Trump and became a radical populist party.
In general,
the appearance of new parties like Vox and Podemos encouraged a centrifugal type of competition.
You can see this at the regional level too. In the past in Catalonia a moderate party, CiU, was replaced by the radical Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya. The same is likely to happen in the Basque Country, where the moderate nationalist PNV is likely to be defeated at the next elections by Bildu, the representatives of the former terrorist group ETA. Parties in the middle have never been successful. Adolfo Suarez tried with CDS and failed, and later Rosa Díez tried with UPyD, a splinter from the Socialists. The last case was Ciudadanos, but as our colleague Juan Rodriguez Teruel explains in a great article published in 2020, Ciudadanos actually prevented the People’s Party from looking more for the center.
So, at the moment there are two large potential or actual alliances. What are the most contentious ideological, personal, and programmatic issues within these alliances, and how do they deal with them?
In the last elections one important issue was the enmity between Pablo Iglesias and Yolanda Diaz within Sumar. In fact, it was not clear at the very beginning whether Podemos was going to join Sumar. Yolanda Diaz didn’t want to give Pablo Iglesias’s wife, Irene Montero, who was back then Minister of Equality, a place on the electoral list. This issue was not properly solved, and Podemos no longer belongs to Sumar. Another issue was related to the law on sexual freedom, the so-called “only yes is yes” law, which was a disaster as it led to the release of 200 rapists and reduced the sentence for more than 1000 people who committed sexual crimes. As a result, the Socialist Party tried to distance itself from Sumar and Podemos.
Another issue is the tension between the People’s Party and Vox. PP prefers to cooperate with Vox only in parliament, not in government, but in many regions they can’t avoid governmental coalitions. The tensions have been fueled in the past by some personal issues between these parties. For example, when Vox introduced a motion of non-confidence against the government, the previous leader of the People’s Party, Pablo Casado, attacked Vox and its leader, Santiago Abascal, very harshly. The ideological differences are not that big. Vox voters are, of course, more conservative, and some of them are even Francoists and authoritarian. But the main distinction concerns the attitude towards Sanchez, with Vox being much more hostile. Feijóo is moderate – he sometimes even talks about the good Socialist Party, meaning the traditional Socialist Party, with more sense of Spain as a nation. In fact, under Sanchez the Socialists have changed very much – they are a leader-cult party. We have the joke that in PSOE PS refers to Pedro Sanchez.
There are also big tensions between Junts and Esquerra. They formed, as I mentioned, an electoral bloc earlier and now they support the government of Sanchez because they know this is the only way they can get the famous amnesty and further results for Catalonia. But in reality they hate each other. This is not so much because Junts is right-wing and Esquerra is left-wing, but more because Junts has a unilateralist approach to independence while Esquerra is in favor of pacts withSanchez. So you could say that it’s personal, ideological, and pragmatic. I would say that the issue is more pragmatic than anything else.
Generalizing now a bit, when parties in Spain decide about cooperation, how do they do that? Do they look at opinion polls? Are all the decisions made behind closed doors? Do they involve party members? What is the mechanism of decision making?
Decisions typically happen in the so-called smoke-filled rooms, behind closed doors.
Polling doesn’t really shape cooperation, it only plays some role for new parties in certain districts by telling them which would have more chances. Even the discussions around the amnesty law were confined to the leaders – party members can only have a confirmatory role. In the Socialist party and in Podemos there were consultations with members, but consultations are used to ratify agreements made by leaders behind closed doors.
Do alliances pose a threat to the identity of the parties? In general, are there risks attached to inter-party cooperation in Spain?
Electorally for sure. Out of the around seven examples I have mentioned only one was an electoral success. There is a very strong attachment in Spain to individual parties. We have cooperation at the governmental level, but at the level of electoral competition coalitions don’t work well because they make some of the traditional voters of the party abstain.
Let me ask finally a question that you don’t need to answer as it is not a very fair question, but what do you think: what will be the composition of the next Spanish government and why?
It depends on when the elections will take place.
If the amnesty law fails and Junts stops supporting the current government then it will be very difficult for the Socialists to pass any legislation, including a bill on the budget. This would mean that Sanchez must call a new election. And then the new government will definitely be a center-right government.
The exact composition will depend on whether the People’s Party manages to obtain an absolute majority or not. But most probably it will be a one-party government of the People’s Party with the parliamentary support of Vox and some of the regionalist parties like, for example, Coalición Canaria.
