What is the Popular Party for in 2018?
(26/06/2018) Years of major corruption cases have tainted the brand.
(Original published: June 26, 2018)
The Popular Party released preliminary data for its leadership contest on Tuesday. Only 64,523 out of 869,535 members—about 7.4%—are up-to-date with their fees and therefore eligible to vote. Nearly 40% of those are concentrated in just seven provinces: Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla, Murcia, La Rioja, Mallorca and Málaga, with the Spanish capital by far the most numerous, with 10,000 paying members. What percentage of the 64,000 will vote on the day, and for which of the six candidates? “If the party is not excited about this”, said one of the six, Pablo Casado, “we’re going to lose the elections”. Spain will hold local, regional and European ballots in 2019.
Mariano Rajoy was appointed fourteen years ago by José María Aznar, in person. Combined with Spain’s closed-list electoral system, six and a half years in government, and the tier of regional delegates loyal to regional party bosses—not to grassroots members—who also get a say about who becomes the next leader, the Popular Party is not used to internal democracy and does not seem prepared for it. What happens if the regional delegates opt for a different candidate than those party members who do vote? On Tuesday, other candidates described the very low grassroots figures as bordering on the ridiculous. The sudden appearance of six contenders—ranging from three former ministers to an unknown PP councillor from Valencia—is more a sign of decomposition than regeneration.
For comparison’s sake, when Pedro Sánchez was re-elected as the leader of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) last year, 150,000 ballots were cast and he won with more votes, 74,805, than there are paying members of the PP. The powerful regional First Minister of Andalusia, Susana Diaz, was not far off either, with 59,392 votes. Even last month’s farcical Podemos vote on Pablo Iglesias’s new luxury home outside Madrid drew 188,000 (non-paying) participants.
The bigger problem the Popular Party faces is about values and what the party stands for anymore. Years of corruption headlines from multiple cases affecting the party have trashed the brand. Then there was the slow political purge over the years by Mr. Rajoy, first of the liberal right and then of Spain’s religious right, leaving a kind of centre-right nothingness, offset by an acceptable economic performance out of the economic crisis and last year by being the governing party that resisted the push to independence by Catalan separatists, which is not necessarily the same thing as standing up for Spain.
Ciudadanos stole that position, shooting up in the polls, having got rid of “social-democracy” from its philosophy last year in favour of a liberal right position. Listening to political commentators over the past few weeks, it is difficult to latch on to any position on any issue where the PP could now claim to be ahead of or particularly differentiated from Albert Rivera’s party. Two polls since the motion of no confidence in Mariano Rajoy show Spain’s alt-right party Vox might win its first seat or seats in Congress.
If the PP is not sure of its values any more, is split six ways over a new leader, can only rustle up a measly 7.4% of party members to try to cast a ballot, and cannot differentiate itself from Ciudadanos or Vox, how is it going to develop policies, messaging and electoral campaigns that motivate voters in 2019?