Catalonia: end of cycle
Alex Colás analyses the results of Sunday’s regional election.
It is a commonplace of modern Spanish politics that peripheral regions play an outsize role on the national political stage. From casting lead actors like premiers Felipe González, Mariano Rajoy, or the dictator Francisco Franco, through to regional nationalists offering backstage “confidence and supply” agreements that buttressed successive national governmments, the uncomfortable truth for Madrid’s self-important, centralist political class is that their fate is all-too-often sealed at the geographical edges of the country.
Sunday’s Catalan elections delivered a decisive victory for national incument Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist Party, with 28% of the vote and 42 out of the regional chamber’s 135 seats, while the right-wing nationalist formation, Together for Catalonia (Junts per Catalunya, JxCat), came second with just under 22% and 35 seats.
Other winners on the night were the right-wing Popular Party which, on 11% and 15 represenatives, obtained its best result in Catalan regional elections since 2012 – largely by absobring voters from the now-deceased centrist Ciudadanos. Note also the Spanish far-right Vox (8% of the vote, and 11 deputies) and the local anti-Muslim and xenophobic Aliança Catalana, with just under 4% of the vote, concentrated in the small town of Ripoll – birthplace of several jihadists responsible for terrrorist attacks of 2017 in Barcelona and Cambrils.
The green-left Comuns lost two deputies in respect of its previous incarnation as part of a coalition with the electorally defunct Podemos, and so can claim to still be treading water with six seats representing around 6% of the electrorate, drawn largely from the metropolitan Barcelona area. Catalonia’s ruling party, the Republican Catalan Left (Esquerra Republicana de Catalanunya, ERC) suffered a major debacle, losing 13 seats with just under 14% of the vote.
The majority of the Catalan electorate has thus for the first time in over a decade backed ‘unionist’ parties opposing Catalan independence, thereby also boosting a beleaguered left-wing coalition government in Madrid. The latter paradoxically mustered a wafer-thin parliamentary majority after last summer’s snap election only through the support of regional nationalists – including the six JxCat national deputies.
The cornerstone of Pedro Sánchez’s new parliamentary term has so far been an Amnesty Law aimed at putting behind the social polarisation within Catalonia, and the political antagonsim between central and regional governments triggered by the controversial 2017 Catalan independence referendum. Sunday’s contest was in large measure a plebiscite on the Amnesty Law and the conciliatory road-map it charts for the region, circumventing both Catalan secession and Spanish centralist repression. It has been widely interpreted as an endorsement by most Catalans of Sánchez’s détente strategy.
Yet the election leaves many indeterminate outcomes, and raises several new thorny issues. The parliamentary arithmetic and ideological alignemnt points to a left-wing regional government led by the Socialist Party in coalition with Comuns and support from the social democratic ERC.
However, in Catalonia in particular, the left-right split is overdetermined by the unionist-separatist divide in ways that fuel a rivalry between the progressive ERC and the Christian Democratic JxCat for the independentist vote, as much as between the latter two and their Spanish unionist opponents.
A stability-inducing ‘grand coalition’ between Socialists and JxCat is favoured by representatives of capital, both nationally and regionally, but would be a perverse representation of voters’ preferences. Meanwhile, JxCat’s exiled leader Carles Puigdemont is indulging in Bonapartist fantasies of returning to Catalonia to rekindle the independence process on the back of the Amnesty Law, with the six JxCat deputies in the Spanish Congress acting as kingpins for Sánchez’s narrow majority.
He is demanding fiscal concessions for Catalonia and the commitment to a new independence referendum in exchange for supporting Sánchez’s coninuity in Madrid and the formation of a Socialist-led regional governement in Catalonia. This calculus, however, is undermined by the fact that his amnesty is entirely reliant on Socialist admininstrations prospering both nationally and in Catalonia – fresh elections in either Spain or Catalonia would most likey bolster right-wing forces deeply anatgonistic to Puigedemont and what he represents.
The Catalan regional elections follow ballots for Galician and Basque assemblies in February and April respectively which, in contrast to Catalonia, have rewarded left-nationalist forces prioritising class and social inequalities over national or identitarian issues. Catalonian separatism has been one – if by no means the only – factor in the rise of the Spanish neo-Francoist Vox, and the electoral ascendancy of the Popular Party. As if imitating the worst of the rest of the country, Catalans now have their own racist and xenophobic representatives in Aliança Catalana, intent on fanning the flames of wider social polarisation.
The strikingly low turn-out – at close to 58%, far below the 70-80% participation in previous regional and general elections – signals a clear political disaffection with confrontational strategies of secession. It also reflects a political culture which has marginalised the already underepresented immigrant and urban working-class communities, most of whom remain uninterested in petty nationalisms, and who on Sunday voted overhwelmingly for left-wing ‘unionist’ parties.
These are lessons hopefully being absorbed by the Spanish left as one ‘populist-secessonist’ political cycle closes, and a new ‘class and social-progressive’ phase struggles to be born.
Alex Colás is a member of the Labour Party in Brent, North West London.
Image: Map of Spain with Catalonia highlighted. Source: File:EspañaLoc.svg, de HansenBCN. Modificada por User:Mutxamel. Author: Mutxamel, subido por Rastrojo, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
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