The defeat is a payback for the crass mishandling of the economic crisis, writes PADDY WOODWORTH
SPANISH MUNICIPAL elections have a track record for creating drama. The triumph of republican and left-wing candidates in 1931 sparked the declaration of the ill-fated Second Republic.
Last weekend’s clean sweep by conservatives in town councils and most of Spain’s autonomous regional parliaments is unlikely to provoke a regime change. It will not even necessarily precipitate early general elections, which the conservatives have called for and the beleaguered Socialist Party (PSOE) prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has ruled out.
But the poll was marked by three strands of drama, at least two of which will have a big impact on the country’s immediate future.
The first was the overwhelming victory of the right-wing Partido Popular (PP) over the PSOE, which produced the worst results for the Spanish centre-left in many years. A similarly commanding 10 per cent lead for the PP in the general elections, due next March, would probably put the country firmly in the hands of one of the EU’s most conservative big parties.
The second strand ran in the opposite direction, with the triumph in the Basque Country of the new left-wing and pro- independence coalition Bildu, which the Supreme Court had banned for alleged links to the terrorist group Eta. After a last-minute reversal of that ban by the Constitutional Court, Bildu surprised even its own supporters by taking 25 per cent of the Basque vote.
The impact of the third drama in the elections is much harder to read. The 15-M street protest movement came out of nowhere a week before the elections and occupied the big city centres, calling for a boycott of all the big parties; spoiled votes; reform of Spain’s institutions; and an end to austerity measures.
There was a significant increase in spoiled votes last Sunday but it remains to be seen whether 15-M is the start of a coherent organisation representing the frustrations of millions affected by the recession or a damp if colourful squib.
The PP can certainly take short-term pleasure in its resounding and skilfully managed victory. In the election campaign, PP president Mariano Rajoy was careful to say nothing to remind centrist voters of the party’s evolution towards the hard right.
He calculated correctly that the appalling record of the PSOE in handling the economic crisis would drive those voters in droves into the PP camp. He reaped Sunday’s big rewards by cooling the party’s often incendiary rhetoric and offering few concrete proposals. However, the new PP administrations will face huge challenges, and not only from the economic meltdown, which has been fuelled by the profligacy and corruption of prominent local representatives of both big parties.
Bildu’s unprecedented emergence as the second political force in the Basque Country will be very hard for the PP to digest. Conservative spokesmen had excoriated the courts for “allowing Eta to return to the institutions”.
By portraying Bildu as terrorists, when most evidence suggests radical Basques are utterly disenchanted with political violence, the PP has painted itself into an awkward corner.
But many conservatives are just as uncomfortable with what Bildu’s success really represents: an expression of desire for Basque self-determination shared by many members of less radical Basque nationalist parties.
Meanwhile, the decision by 15-M to keep thousands of supporters occupying city centres for another week may clarify what the movement really wants and how firm its supporters will stand with the election spotlight turned off. If, as some suggest, it indicates the rebirth of a radical left across all of Spain, it will make a volatile mix with the new PP town councils and regional governments.
The PSOE’s crushing defeat must be particularly bitter for Zapatero, who had announced before this campaign that he would not lead the party into the 2012 general election. His star has sunk low since the heady idealism that fuelled his surprise election victory in 2004, promising the kind of renewal then that now seems to inspire 15-M.
His crass mishandling of Spain’s current crisis, which is comparable with Ireland’s and has left five million mainly young people on the dole, made defeat on Sunday inevitable. But the scale of it was devastating, with the loss even of Barcelona, a PSOE fiefdom for more than three decades.