Could intense drought affect Spanish elections?

The driest parts of the country have seen less than 80 mm of rain in the past six months, have reservoirs at less than 25% capacity and are in emergency status.

Some Spaniards are praying for rain. The drought has made international headlines: “Catalonia in grip of worst drought in decades”, wrote the BBC. In Andalusia, there is a fight between the conservative regional government and the socialist-communist national goverment over irrigation water for farmers near the Doñana national park. That has also been picked up by the Associated Press. Farmers say they feel trapped in the middle. Articles have started to appear suggesting drought might become an election storm, with the local and regional ballots now just weeks away (May 28). But how has the situation changed? Is it much worse than previous years? Is it seasonal or prolonged?

Here is the drought map for Spain for March 2019, from the Environment Ministry (formally the Ecological Transition & Demographic Challenge Ministery). As you can see, back then, as the trial of the Catalan separatists got underway at the Supreme Court in Madrid, the water situation was mostly green and yellow, mostly normal with a few orange “alert” patches.

Here is the same seasonal drought map for Spain this year, March 2023. Now, while half of the country is still normal green, there are lots of bright red and orange emergency alert areas. Almost all of the south (Andalusia, Extremadura, Murcia) is red, orange or yellow, along with the north-east (Catalonia, Aragón).

The maps from the intervening period at the same point in the calendar show the situation has become progressively worse over those four years. There are also maps for “prolonged drought”. That map currently looks like this:

The worst affected areas combined, prolonged drought and seasonal alerts or emergencies, would appear to be not just Catalonia north of the Ebro as the BBC article highlights but also two regions in Spain’s deep south: east of Badajoz (the Guadiana river) and the north-western part of Murcia (the Segura river). Another government map with the state of play at Spain’s reservoirs tells a similar story: many in the south and the north-east are below 25%.

And finally we could take a look at what Spanish weather service AEMET says about rainfall this year. This map is accumulated rainfall between October last year and April 2023. The darkest orange or even red bits in the south-east, from where I write The Spain Report for you, have had less than 80mm of rainfall in the past six months, in total.

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