Comment: it's too early for another Ciudadanos
Spanish voters said at the 2023 elections they don't want a centrist "hinge" party.
Comment: polarised antagonist forces
Comment: language, power, identity, dominance
Comment: Puigdemont's amnesty
Tomorrow a group of intellectuals will go to a notary’s office and formally create The Third Spain, the germ of a new centrist political party to follow on from Ciudadanos (Citizens) and UPyD (Union, Progress & Democracy). Lots of the founding names are familiar as founding or central names from those previous two efforts, both of which, of course, failed, UPyD in 2014 and Ciudadanos just recently over the summer of 2023, having decided not to bother to run in the general election in July, after losing all their seats in regional parliaments at the regional elections in May, following a long and tortuous previous twelve months trying to find the party’s real left-centre-liberal-right soul and sort out a leadership strategy that made the best of an increasingly bad job, after an earlier leadership crisis when the most well-known leader, Albert Rivera, resigned, after failing to take advantage of the political moment in 2019 to do a 180-seat centre-left coalition deal with the PSOE and dropping to 10 MPs at the November repeat election. You get the idea.
There is a new manifesto, full of centrist, liberal or even conservative ideas but which ends up promising a “reformist left”. “As autumn 2023 begins”, says the text, blaming both left and right for the problem, “our country, Spain, is on the brink of implosion”. The “personality cult” around Pedro Sánchez in the PSOE appears to the new-old group to be particularly problematic, and the whole shebang is wrapped in “a corrupt party system”, all of which sullies what could be a much cleaner, more functional Spanish democracy, with the previous and likely next Sánchez government held together by a “motely collection of microparties” instead of some kind of grand state coaltion as happens in fifteen other European countries then name, from Iceland to Switzerland. The situation, says the group, is one of “democratic anormality” that “reflects a dangerous fracturing of the electorate”. They want to be a new “modern”, “non populist”, “European”, “social-democratic”, “transparent”, “left-wing” party, faithful to the values and spirit of Spain’s Transition to democracy in the 1970s, and that supports the separation of powers, the struggle against political corruption, Spain as a nation, a centralised foreign policy, education and the Spanish language, and an efficient market economy. A party all the old boys (and girls) of Spanish politics would feel comfortable in.
If you feel like you’ve seen all this before somewhere at any point over the past, say, fifteen years, since UPyD appeared in national politics, and through all of the years of “hinge party” politics and the Ciudadanos angst over its left-wing origins in Barcelona and its later national centre-liberal-right existential doubts, you’d be absolutely right. There is nothing new in this project at all, except the name. The ideas are still there, which is perhaps what attracts the (same) intellectuals as before. You might even agree with some or much of their systemic diagnosis of the ills of the Spanish political system, based as it is on that 1978 Constitution, and how much life has changed since then. The problem both times before, though, was leadership, execution and acceptance by the broader electorate. Spanish politics has indeed fractured over the past 10 years, with Podemos, Ciudadanos, Vox, more vociferous regional separatist parties and now Sumar, but voters just decided at general, regional and local elections that they didn’t want whatever Ciudadanos was really selling, and even less than last time in 2019. Politics has become more polarised everywhere in the West over those same 10 years. Whether you agree with it or not, Spanish voters have just chosen the non-centre options, or at best have voted more for the larger established parties on either side, the PSOE and PP, than the more extreme options on either end, Vox and Sumar. As a whole, across the whole electorate, they don’t want a centre or a hinge party.
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Catalonia needs also a proper central party to separate from Spain. Like PNV at the Basque Country but with concierto. It is easier with concierto, but is is the only realistic way of being independent.
Such a shame. Spain needs a centrist party. But if no one votes for one...