La Meridiana Avenue of Barcelona during a mass demonstration calling for the independence of Catalonia on 11 September, 2015. Jordi Boixareu/ Flickr. Some rights reserved.176. This is the magic number in Spanish politics. Half+1 members of Congress, which is a 350-seat semicircle now plagued with as many as twelve different political groups. Or even fifteen, if you dare to count in the three regional-based confluences finally included within the Podemos “Confederal” brand that was unable to get a deal to obtain a separate group of their own.
Spain used to be a game of two. The Popular Party (PP) and the Socialist Party (PSOE) would often rely on regional-based forces such as Convergència i Unió (CiU) in Catalonia to secure comfortable majorities either to the right or to the left. Jordi Pujol, president of Catalonia for 23 years and indisputable leader of CiU, was celebrated as a key negotiator and even named “Spanish Man of the Year” in 1993 by conservative newspaper ABC.
Yet these times are long gone. Jordi Pujol is facing trial for alleged corruption and has vanished from the political arena, while his former coalition Convergència i Unió doesn’t even exist as such anymore. Many Catalans have turned their eyes to independence, and the Republican Left (ERC) and Democràcia i Llibertat (DiL, a coalition that engulfed part of the former CiU) are their new fierce representatives. They won’t settle for less than a Scotland-like self-determination referendum. Most importantly, as we shall see, they hold seventeen seats in Congress.
