Out with the old politics, but the shape of Spain’s new politics is far from clear

The old joke about Franco is that when the news that he had died was announced to the cabinet, there was a long silence, and then one minister said: “Yes, but who’s going to tell him?” Franco’s long reign did indeed in some ways go on after his death, in that the new democracy’s politics came to be dominated by a rightwing party that drew together the modernising and more moderate elements in the old regime, and a leftwing party that grouped some of the forces that had opposed the dictator. The settlement between the two, their alternation in power, and the influence of an enlightened monarch produced a two-party system that gave Spain stability, containing once visceral divisions and sustaining a rapid economic development which had begun under Franco and which has faltered only recently.

But over time it also became calcified, intermittently corrupt, incapable of responding imaginatively to discontented minorities, and one of the two parties was committed to a centralisation of power that was increasingly a bad fit with Spain’s diversity. When it also began to fail to deliver economically, the writing was on the wall. This era ended on Sunday in the Spanish general elections when the mainstream parties, the conservative People’s party, or PP, and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party, or PSOE, were rudely bumped out of their accustomed orbits by two newcomers.

The outcome may not be clear for some time, and a return to the electors cannot be ruled out

Podemos, or “We can”, a radical party on the left, has been in existence for less than two years, while Ciudadanos, or Citizens, originally a Catalan party opposed to independence there, only began organising, as a new kind of centrist party, in the rest of Spain in 2013. Together they took more than a third of the vote, leaving the older parties with just over a half, and stripping the ruling People’s party of its parliamentary majority.

The arithmetic makes coalition building difficult. There are not enough seats for the obvious coalition of the right, but mustering one on the left will be hard because of critical differences between the possible partners. The outcome may not be clear for some time, and a return to the electors cannot be ruled out. What is more important than these contingent matters is that Spanish politics has been opened up in a dramatic way.

A new pluralism has replaced the old duopoly. The immediate causes were an upsurge of feeling against austerity policies similar to that elsewhere in Europe, especially in Greece and Italy, rage over unemployment, and disgust over corruption scandals that undermined the reputation of the older parties. But the transformation of the party landscape reflects deeper changes in Spanish society, generational, economic, historical and philosophical.

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A large number of Spaniards have no memory of the Franco years, and a significant fraction no particular recall of, or gratitude for, the skilful way in which the country was guided through the early years of the transition from dictatorship, avoiding army intervention, making Spain internationally respected, and creating a prosperous society.

Their background was not one of rising prosperity but one of rising inequality. The youngest cohorts, looking at up to 47% unemployment in their age group, have indeed had an exactly opposite experience to the relatively secure circumstances of their parents, which is why millions of them took to the streets in 2011. Many older people in their families, even when well off themselves, were drawn to these indignados.

Soon men and women from a slightly older age bracket, most of them from academic or non-corporate business backgrounds, emerged as leaders to give party-political form to this movement. All wanted constitutional change. Podemos, especially, called for a new politics in which there would be continuous popular participation.

It would be foolish to draw too sharp a line under the past. The vote was a reaction to inequality but also reflected it, with anecdotal evidence suggesting older, better–off people voted on Sunday for the old parties. Those parties are reduced but far from finished.

The new parties will find their programmes diluted as they are forced to compromise in coalition building or in forging opposition alliances, so that Podemos’s ideas, for example, already modified in the search for electoral advantage, are unlikely to be put into practice in any full way. But Spain needed to change and it has changed. That is enough for the moment.