Spain’s Year of the Polls

Flickr. Some rights reserved.In times of accelerating change, the a-synchronicity between current public opinion and elected representative bodies grows. The former has to do with present reality while the latter reflects a reality of the past, when the elections were last held - and it seems such a long time ago. This gap, a common end-of-term phenomenon affecting parties in office in all liberal democracies, becomes a systemic risk factor when it widens beyond moderate boundaries, separating the views of the public from those of the main parties - in government and in the opposition. It is then a measure of citizen disaffection.

This is particularly so in places such as Spain today, where the mandatory austerity measures have been applied with particular harshness by the local branch of the European People’s Party, producing a major social emergency. According to the European Anti Poverty Network (EAPN), 12.8 million Spanish citizens (out of a population of 47 million) are now facing relative poverty and social exclusion, up 27.3% since 2010. According to EUROSTAT (2012), more than one in three Spanish children (33.8 %) is living at risk of poverty or social exclusion (EU 28 = 28.0 %). And according to the OECD, over the last seven years inequality has grown at a far quicker pace in Spain than in any other member country (including Greece and Portugal), so that Spain is now heading the European ranking, second only to Estonia.

This is where Podemos and other new political actors come into play, to the effect of shattering the intellectual safety of the established two-party system and doing away with the received wisdom regarding the ineluctability of the law of the pendulum. The situation is such that today political prospective has become a particularly tricky business in Spain while being, at the same time, in high demand. This has resulted in an unprecedented opinion-poll craze in the country.