Sol square cleared of last 15-M activists, August 2011. Demotix/Nathalie Paco. All rights reserved.Never had democratic Spain seen a political party accumulate as much power as the Popular Party (PP) - the Spanish Conservatives, amassed in 2011, the last time the whole country went to the polls to elect local governments and renew 13 out of 17 regional assemblies.
The debacle it suffered on May 24, 2015, was therefore magnified by its previous inordinate success. The overall shift to the left is unquestionable, but the Socialist party not only failed to capitalize on the nearly 2.5 million votes lost by the Conservatives, it even lost a further 700,000 supporters compared to their dismal 2011 performance. With the Conservative Catalan Nationalists of CiU losing another 110,000 votes, the only influential party of the traditional Spanish party system to hold its ground, and indeed grow, has been the Conservative Basque Nationalists of PNV/EAJ.
Spain’s tsunami and its tides
Anti-eviction protest in Madrid over terminally ill resident, 2014. Demotix/Juan Carlos Lucas. All rights reserved.The seism that polls had been predicting in Spanish politics since autumn 2014 had finally materialized in actual elections results. Those who expected fundamental change were not disappointed. The overall numbers still show the Popular Party topping the popular vote, followed by the Socialists. But the unprecedented successes of local lists led by civic activists in most of Spain’s largest cities, and the impressive results in regional elections (all regions voted except Andalusia, Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country) of two newcomers to the Spanish political scene, the new left radicals of Podemos and centre liberals of Ciudadanos, have shaken the party system and threatened the hegemony not just of the PP, but of the two parties that had for decades held the overwhelming majority of positions of power (with the partial exceptions of peripheral nationalists in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Navarre and the Canary Islands). A tsunami it was not, but a series of tides, some of them high, many of them unexpected, rose across the Spanish electoral geography, most noticeably in the large cities.
