By Bécquer Seguín and Sebastiaan Faber
On October 29, four months after the most recent parliamentary elections, the Spanish parliament voted to reelect Mariano Rajoy, head of the conservative Partido Popular (PP), as the country’s prime minister. Rajoy’s minority government, sworn in today, is poised to continue a politics of austerity and privatization that, at its peak, left more than one in four Spaniards jobless. And it is thanks to the center-left Socialist party (PSOE), Spain’s second-biggest party, that he will get the opportunity. While two smaller parties—Ciudadanos, a young right-wing party, and Coalición Canaria, the longtime ruling regional party of the Canary Islands—supported Rajoy, the key votes were abstentions. Four-fifths of the PSOE’s deputies followed a party mandate to abstain, despite the fact that the party had campaigned on the promise to push Rajoy out. The other fifth kept its word, voting “no” in open defiance of their own party’s most recent conservative turn. The result: For the first time in Spain’s democracy, a prime minister has been elected with the help of the primary opposition party. Instead of a “grand coalition” between the center right and the center left, as Europe has seen in Germany or the Netherlands, the Socialist party appears to have self-destructed in order to pave the way for a continuation of conservative rule.
The Socialists’ divided vote stated the obvious: The party’s institutional fabric is tearing at the seams. The thread that once tied together the rank and file and the party elite—which includes many, such as former Prime Minister Felipe González, who helped orchestrate the country’s transition to democracy after the death of dictator Francisco Franco—is quickly coming undone. The decision to let Rajoy continue was spun by Socialist leaders as a necessary sacrifice for the sake of ending a 315-day political deadlock. After two general elections, Spain’s fragmented parliament had been unable to forge a governing coalition. A failure to elect a prime minister last weekend would have automatically triggered the third election in thirteen months, an option that would have gone against the wishes of two-thirds of Spaniards.
In early October, then PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez, who had vowed to vote against Rajoy, was effectively forced to resign as a result of party elites’ increasingly favorable view of abstention. A cabal of party heavyweights with deep ties to the country’s corporate and media establishment selected a managing committee to take over the party reins and, last week, that committee asked its parliamentarians to abstain, despite pleas from numerous representatives of Catalonia and other regions. The committee’s reasons for choosing abstention were largely unstated but clear enough. After obtaining the party’s worst-ever result in December and losing even more votes in June, a third election would only have accelerated the PSOE’s decline. But there was a more likely motive: In the eyes of the Socialist chieftains, forming a progressive coalition to end conservative rule in Spain would have been more dangerous to the party’s future. Such a coalition would have included Podemos, which allied with the longstanding United Left for the June elections to form Unidos Podemos (“United We Can”), and smaller parties from Catalonia and the Basque Country that favor increased self-rule or even independence—options anathema to a party leadership and to a good part of the rank and file, particularly in the central and southern parts of the country where “the unity of Spain” is as sacred as it is for the right.
