Spanish regional elections

Spain has been hit hard by the economic crisis, it was already experience a housing market collapse when September’s market meltdown hit. These are the first major elections in a Western country since the Financial Crisis, but it’s hard to read these results as relating to it particularly strongly.

Galicia and the Basque Country are two of the four Spanish regions with the right to have elections independently of national and provincial elections (the other two being Andalusia and Catalonia) and both went to the polls yesterday.

Change (back) in Galicia

I’ll start with Galicia since it’s relatively straightforward. The major players are the two national parties, the center-left Socialists (PSG) and the center-right Popular Party (PP), along with the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG). Basically, the poor, rural, conservative country, which once produced Franco and has since supplied a steady stream of conservative politicians, been a PP fiefdom ever since Manuel Fraga, former Franquist, took power after the transition to democracy.

The exception was 2005 when a combination of discontent over Iraq and the third major oil spill in 20 years got the left motivated enough and supported enough to barely, briefly take power. The PSG and BNG coalition had a piddling one vote majority. This has now ended with the conservative PP cruising to a new absolute majority, and whilst some are interpreting this as discontent over the nationally-governing Socialists’ managing of the financial crisis, I prefer to interpret it as a mere return to apathetic, conservative normality for Galicia.

The mess that is the Basque Country

Euskadi is a paradox. Richest part of Spain (or richer than Spain, depending on who you talk to) and with a lower unemployment rate, it’s also the most troubled place with some of the messiest politics. Basically, the mainstream nationalists led by the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party) has been in power FOREVER. 29 years. The “abertzele” or patriotic left parties keep getting banned for their ETA taint, essentially disenfranchising between 12 and 15% of the population who either vote for other parties, submit blank ballots, or stay away from the polls.

This year there was a genuine chance that they could lose power to the non-nationalist parties, the Socialists (PSE) and the PP, (ie the two big national parties) due to discontent with the PNV’s shiftless corruption and the abstention of the nationalist left. There’s also been a seeming long term nation-wide trend against regionalist and separatist parties in favour of the two big national parties, which could also be a factor here.

It’s hard to interpret the impact of the financial crisis, the socialists were campaigning on economic issues but the PNV were like, WTF, we have better economic conditions than the Spain you guys are running. I personally doubt there was much impact in the Basque electorate compared to the usual questions of identity and violence.

What has happened is this:

The PNV is the largest party still, but it together with its nationalist allies it has lost an absolute majority. Instead, the Socialists (PSE), PP and a new centrist/liberal Progress and Democracy Union (UPyD) have a potential majority.

The single UPyD vote is very interesting. It is required to form a majority government of non-nationalists. They’re liberals and centrists mostly, but they aim to be cross-sectional and are founded on a platform of being quite explicitly *against* Basque nationalism and separatism. Their leader is a former PSOE member who left over their soft line on ETA, and other stuff. She’d better have some damn good security at this point.

An entirely non-nationalist government in Euskadi would be unprecedented and veeeeery interesting in a place where non-nationalist politicians all have heavy security to thwart the ever present risk of assassination. Establishing an entirely nationalist-free coalition seems to be positively inviting a resurgence of more militant separatism, especially with the frothing anti-nationalists from the PP and UPyD holding the balance.

I’d hate to suggest that fear of violence might keep the entirely moderate and respectable PNV in power, but given the long-running violence and the fact that the banned abertzale parties would have won 7 seats, it’s easy to see how nationalists would view the process as undemocratic and why there might be a big risk of radicalism and militancy in the region. Such a coalition would reinforce the notion of Basques against Spaniards, if the two ‘Spanish’ parties put their differences aside and conspired to keep the ‘Basques’ out of power, in tandem with a court that repeatedly bans major Basque nationalist parties.

If they go the entirely non-nationalist route, things could get very interesting indeed. However, becoming junior party in a coalition with a PNV that has governed for 29 years would probably be seen as pretty weak and insipid on the Socialists’ part. However, PNV are still the largest party, and the Socialists in other regions have shown themselves capable of negotiating and dealing with nationalist parties before… although due to the violence and animosity in País Vasco, the PSE might take a different view of this possibile coalition than do its national or Galician or Catalan brethren.

One also wonders whether the PP could actually swallow their pride and run with the PNV, (a relatively conservative party if you ignore the nationalism) if they can get good coalition conditions out of them. It seems bery very doubtful, but politics makes strange bedfellows and something similar has happened between the PP and conservative nationalists in the Catalan Generalitat in the past. Again though, things are different in violence-scarred Euskadi.

So now you understand the mess that is Basque politics. Well, as much as I do. All eyes on the deal-making!