At the beginning of the 1990s, critics emerged concerning the achievements of Spain’s new democratic system. Whether representatives of trade unions called for “a social turn” (increased welfare spending and worker participation in management), Catalan and Basque nationalists for devolution of powers from Madrid (Castellanos López, 2015, pp. 3519-21), or academics for combating the young democracy’s dysfunctionalities (e.g. the politicisation of the justice system: Sinova and Tusell, 1990) – all of them used the term “Second Transition” to reinforce their claims for the need to fix the glitches the nation presumably faced. The term was also used by José María Aznar, who wrote a book titled “Spain, the Second Transition” (Aznar, 1995), before he was sworn in as the first PM proceeding from the ranks of the conservative party (Partido Popular, PP) in 1996. After José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had regained the PM’s office for the Socialist eight years later, the British weekly The Economist described in an article titled “The Second Transition” various challenges the new PM would face (institutional reform, claims from regionalist parties, social reform, etc.). After his first term in office, numerous observers took up the term, but now to label the Zapatero government’s policy record, especially in social areas.
In many ways, the Zapatero years coined the term “Second Transition” as it is used in current day debates. The Socialist minority government, in alliance with several regional-left parties in the parliamentary arena, took decisive positions within the postmaterialist cleavage, which until then played a rather insignificant role for Spanish party competition. Gay marriage, fast-track divorce, the legal recognition of transgender persons and the legalization of immigrants were top of the list in an agenda drawn up by the first ever governmental cabinet to feature equal gender representation. While these measures provoked not only the PP, but also the Catholic Church and various conservative civil society organisations to strongly voice their opposition; at the same time, they further deepened polarization between the two major political forces - a process that had begun during Jose María Aznar’s second term in office.
Unlike many (international) commentators, who saw an “increase” in “social rights” as a sign of the maturing of the Spanish democracy, the political right accused the Socialists of pursuing an agenda aimed at a disruptive transformation of state and society: Besides social reform, the government pushed a highly controversial “historical memory” law (ley de memoria histórica) through parliament. While in its concrete measures aimed at expanding benefits to those who suffered from repression in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, it broke with a convention of political competition in Spain of not making politics with the country’s past. As the name of the social movement backing the government’s initiatives (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica - Recovery of the historical memory) indicates, its activists denounced a long lasting “pact of silence” in state and society regarding the fate of the Republican fighters and their families. As a result, during the polarized debate on Spain’s past in politics and media, the transition myth was to take the next blow. If the exclusion of memory politics after Franco’s death had once been celebrated as grand statesmanship that helped preventing a reviving of the historic cleavages in Spanish society, it would now be denounced as an indicator of the democracy’s fragility. Podemos co-founder Juan Carlos Monedero even considers the transition to have been a “process of lies for a democracy of lies” (Monedero, 2011, p. 214). Little wonder that from such an assessment of both the process and the outcome of democratization in Spain, Monedero and his allies within Podemos call for a (if not clearly defined) replacement of the “regime of 1978”.
Indeed, there seems to exist a correlation between the assessment political actors make of the historical process (consensus-politics) and its outcome (parliamentary monarchy, bipolar party system, non-confrontational labor relations), and the varying degree of systemic reform they propose (see table 1).
Table 1. Calls for reform, depending on assessment of the transition. Source: Own elaboration.
A different Podemos-faction, close to co-founder Íñigo Errejón, while maintaining that the old elites betrayed the political and syndical labor movement during the decisive years 1977-1978, recognizes the result to be the maximum achievable in that historic moment. Instead of overthrowing the current system, a comprehensive overhaul of constitution and institutions in alliance with other political forces is favored (Franzé, 2017, 233). Party leader Pablo Iglesias (2015) stated in an op-ed in the daily newspaper El País, “[Regarding] the new transition, the fundamental actors should not be political or economic elites, but citizens”. Representatives of the mainstream parties and some of the country’s media outlets (El País, 2012), however, frequently highlight the need for political consensus 1970s-style in order to tackle the country’s grievances. While citizens overwhelmingly agree with this diagnosis (Metroscopia, 2013), political actors have lost much of their authority during the last decade.
With the outbreak of the economic crisis following the slump of international financial markets in 2008, the political class and the country’s institutions would find themselves in the line of fire. Although Spanish citizens had been familiar with reports of corruption scandals, cronyism, and opaque administration before the crisis, now ever fewer would be willing to tolerate such behavior (Kühn, 2013). To make matters worse, corruption has not only been limited to local administrations (mainly misusing their power to grant construction licenses) but affects the very elite of the Spanish political class. Rodrigo Rato, the former Minister of Economy, deputy PM, and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was sentenced to four years in prison for embezzlement in February 2017. Spaniards were thus not too surprised to find out that a bipartisan alliance of managers, politicians and trade union representatives working for the bank Bankia had access to opaque (“black”) credit cards, spending millions of Euros on luxury articles, holiday trips and other non-eligible expenses. The bank was bailed-out with resources proceeding from a 30 billion Euro EU-fund. Because of these and many other scandals, trust in political parties, and the main political institutions (Parliament, Senate, political parties and organisations of the intermediary system) plummeted to record lows (see graphic 1).
Graphic 1. “Little” and “no trust” in institutions. Source: Own elaboration based on data from CIS.
Political polarization between the two mainstream parties, the success of a “revisionist” view on the country’s past and a spectacular drop in the respect and trust felt towards the political elites by the general public are the three main factors that explain the erosion of the “traditional” transition myth. The founding narrative of the Spanish democracy is not only affected by increasing criticism of the way democratization was pursued in Spain (ideological moderation, cross-party consensus seeking and delegation of decision making to selected party representatives), but also by the critics of the alleged result (the dominant role the two mainstream parties played in public life).
In the following section, and after illustrating the effect of the economic crisis for the Spanish party system, I will explore whether this evolution gives way to any of the “Second Transition”-propositions presented above.
3. PARTY SYSTEM AND STRUCTURE OF PARTY COMPETITION
Up to 2008, and against the European trend, the two mainstream parties managed to increase their weight in the Congreso de los Diputados, Spain’s parliament, producing an ever more concentrated party system at the national level. While third party competition was minimized thanks to a polarization strategy between PSOE and PP in the decade before the 2008 crisis, Mariano Rajoy benefitted from the U-turn Socialist PM Zapatero performed in austerity policies during his second term in office in a 2011 snap election. At that time, with unemployment already close to 4.5 million people, Conservatives and Socialist still managed to secure a 73 per cent share of the vote. The