An election, as the Spanish media like to remind us, is la gran fiesta de la democracia - democracy’s great party - something to be cherished in a country that until 1978 was a dictatorship. And yet, as Spain heads into its July 23rd general election, a look back at its 21st century electoral dates shows that the election night fiestas have been matched by a number of electoral flops, when the results led only to political deadlock and election re-runs. Moreover, the only two occasions when Spanish voters have managed to throw out a sitting government this century required quite extraordinary political circumstances - a terrorist attack and a deep global recession. And then there was the third and most recent change of government - the one which brought Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists (PSOE) to power in 2018: it did not involve the electors at all, but an MPs’ no-confidence motion.

Here are the five key episodes in Spain’s electoral politics since the start of the 21st century:

2004: the Madrid bombs and Aznar’s lies

“España va bien”, said prime minister José María Aznar - "Spain is going well". It was swaggering arrogance, and yet, with a booming economy fuelled by construction, speculation and tourism, he seemed to be right. However, three days before the March 2004 election in which the leadership baton seemed likely to be passed to his People’s Party (PP) successor Mariano Rajoy, disaster struck: Jihadist suicide bombers attacked in Madrid’s suburban trains, exploding a total of ten bombs. It was sheer horror. 193 innocent people were killed, and thousands were injured. But within hours, Aznar had responded by personally telling media editors that the bombs had been planted by the Basque terrorist group ETA, the PP’s bête noir, and his government attempted to sustain that theory. What then followed was a remarkable 72 hour period leading up to the election in which a terror-struck Spanish electorate came to realize, as the facts emerged, that their government was lying to them about perhaps the most important thing of all, the life and death of their fellow citizens. Spaniards went to the polls in large numbers, and gave victory to the Socialists of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

2011: the Socialists sleepwalk to disaster

Zapatero’s PSOE government was re-elected on March 9th, 2008 - a date which has turned out to be the last Spanish election to clearly and comprehensively return a sitting government. If the mantra of Spain “going well” was still valid when the Socialists were returned to power, within months the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy set off the global financial crash. Thereupon began a three-year period in which the economic flood waters rose higher and higher around the Zapatero executive - unemployment, home evictions, bank rescues and the crisis of the Euro - and they seemed powerless in the face of it all. Admittedly, this was far from a uniquely-Spanish story, although few countries fell so far, from boasting of having the “most solid financial system in the world” to rescuing large parts of the sector just as the first signs of its embedded corruption were beginning to emerge. Thus, a Socialist prime minister faced a situation with certain parallels to 2023: seeming destined to lose the election, he called it five months early. In that case, he duly lost; and there was never any doubt that he would. It was November 2011 and despite all that has happened since, that was the last time a Spanish government was thrown out by the will of the voters.

2015-16: the PSOE and PP prop up the paralysis

If ever the map of Spanish electoral support showed a groundswell of popular malaise, it was in the elections that followed the bleak first term of Mariano Rajoy’s government. The conservative PP executive had responded to deep recession with deep austerity measures, while the foul stench of serious corruption pervaded most of the Spanish establishment, from the PP itself to the Bourbon monarchy. In this context, calls for profound political change came from the new alternative left led by Podemos and the by-then massive Catalan independence movement. The election of December 20th, 2015, saw the fragmentation of Spain’s two-party system: in the 350-seat Congress, Podemos took 69 seats and centre-right Ciudadanos (Cs) won 40, while the two major parties were both decimated: the PP fell from 187 to 123 seats, and the PSOE from 110 to just 90. But neither left nor right, nor both together, were able to muster sufficient support to form a government despite months of talks. The elections were repeated on June 26th 2016, but even then the result changed little and the deadlock continued until, after 10 months without a government, a Socialist party immersed in its own crisis opted to prop up the ailing establishment, by abstaining in an investiture vote and enabling the PP to form a weak minority executive.

2018: Rajoy is thrown out, but not by the voters

The key event to take place under Rajoy’s second term as Spanish PM was clearly the Catalan independence process which reached its climax with the referendum of October 1st 2017, the unilateral declaration of Catalan independence, and the violent state repression against the independence movement. And yet it is a curious fact that Spanish voters never got to give their electoral verdict on the PP government’s handling of what is widely regarded as the state’s most serious crisis since the 1980s. That's because Mariano Rajoy’s government was thrown out of power without facing the voters, thanks to the Spanish political instrument of a no-confidence vote, allowing an opposition party to take power without an election if the government loses such a vote. PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez audaciously called such a vote for June 1st 2018, and won it, supported by the parties of the left and of the Spanish periphery - Catalans, Basques and Galicians. And note that the no-confidence motion against Rajoy did not arise from the Catalan independence issue, but rather, he was thrown out thanks to the harsh court verdict on one of the major PP corruption affairs, the Gürtel case. Within weeks, Rajoy had left politics, and almost all of his senior ministers also hastily departed from the political front line.

2019: Pedro Sánchez chooses the only option “left”

Spain’s most recent appointment with the ballot boxes turned into another double date: as in 2015-16, political fragmentation in 2019 again made forming a government so difficult that Spain spent seven months under a caretaker administration with a second election being required. In the first vote, which took place in the middle of the Supreme Court mega-trial of the Catalan pro-independence leaders, on 28th April 2019, the Socialists were clear winners, rising from 85 seats to 123, but since Unidas Podemos had lost ground since 2016, their combined total was insufficient and in any case the two parties failed to agree. Pedro Sánchez also had the theoretical option of forming a government with Ciudadanos, which won a massive 57 seats in the April vote, but here again, there was reticence on both sides. Thus to the second vote, just a month after the pro-independence leaders had received long prison sentences for sedition, and this time it was the transfers in support within the right-wing block which decided the issue: the Cs vote collapsed, the PP recovered, and far-right Vox, which had gone from 0 to 24 seats in April, now leapt to 52 seats and third largest party. The Socialists came out of the November 10th election weakened but within days they announced a government deal with Unidas Podemos. In April it had not been clear that the political chameleon Sánchez was more comfortable making deals “on his left”, but after the November vote, he quickly took the only real option that was “left” for him to choose. Six weeks later, after securing minor party support and in particular, abstentions from pro-independence parties ERC and EH Bildu, he had enough support to become prime minister. 

 

Main photo: Former Spanish prime ministers José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (PSOE) and Mariano Rajoy (PP) / Europa Press