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Adriaan Ph. V. Kühn

1. INTRODUCTION

Calls for a “Second Transition” have been ubiquitous in both the political and media debate in present-day Spain. Against the backdrop of an economic crisis, sky-high unemployment and citizens’ trust in political institutions at rock bottom, the Spanish democracy indeed has faced severe challenges on several fronts.

Amidst growing civic disdain for an allegedly unaccountable political class, fueled by corruption scandals affecting virtually all major political parties, together with the subsequent rise of the leftist Podemos party in the 2014 European and 2015 regional elections, many expected – sooner rather than later – the established party system to collapse. Others claimed that the winds of change would not stop blowing just at the steps of parliament. From their perspective, even the wider power arrangements put in place by Spain’s transición – the process of democratic reform after dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 – were challenged by a “growing critique of the imbalances in our model of economic growth, the problems of social development, the limits of democracy, dysfunctional institutions and the State of Autonomies’ asymmetries” (Sánchez Estévez, 2015, p. 3421). The latter issue made the front pages in October 2017, when the regional government of Catalonia tested its counterpart in Madrid with an independence referendum that the Spanish constitutional court had declared illegal. The effects of the (economic) crisis, so it seemed, even put Spain’s territorial integrity at stake. Labor relations proved to be tense as well: In 2012, and for the first time in the history of the parliamentary monarchy, Spain’s trade unions called for two general strikes within only six months to protest the austerity measures imposed by the government.

In the same year, the country’s youth, labelled “the lost generation” by the media due to a 50 percent unemployment rate for those under the age of 30, voiced their discontent through a week-long occupation of one of Madrid’s central squares, demanding a “true democracy” (democracia real ya). Increasingly more Spaniards joined the young people in voicing their discontent with the status quo. While in an opinion poll conducted in 2006 36 per cent of those interviewed declared themselves to be “happy” or “very happy” with the way democracy worked in their country, in 2012 this number had dropped to 22 per cent (CIS, 2016).

However, it appeared that the final blow to the “regime of 1978”, as some detractors call the Spanish democracy’s current configuration, came in June 2014. King Juan Carlos I, one of the transition’s main protagonists (Powell, 1995, p. 151), abdicated in favor of his son Felipe. Juan Carlos, who is considered to have played a crucial part in the crackdown of a putsch staged by officers from the armed forces and the Guardia Civil in 1981, came under the pressure of public opinion when details about a hunting trip to Botswana were leaked to the press. The monarchy’s public image, one of the country’s few non-partisan institutions, had already suffered heavily from corruption allegations against Juan Carlos’ son-in-law, Iñaki Udagarin.

Yet three years on from his father’s abdication, the new head of state Felipe I has managed to regain citizens’ trust in the monarchy, partly by expelling his sister from the royal family’s inner circle and putting the crown’s allowances to public audit. In politics, continuity prevails over change as well; at least regarding the inhabitant of the Moncloa palace, the official residence of Spain’s prime ministers. Despite allegations of illegal party financing, a painfully slow recovery rate for the economy and consequently low approval ratings, the conservative PM Mariano Rajoy withstood a ten-month political stalemate after national elections in December 2015 had produced a hung parliament. He maintained office after calling fresh elections in June 2016; albeit as the head of a minority government.

Supporters of an imminent and deep change in Spain’s institutions, a “Second Transition” breaking with the fundaments the original one set, may have cause for disappointment, but anyone who today demands that the institutional arrangements of Spanish democracy be rearranged no longer holds a minority opinion. The economic crisis revealed a real crisis in the political system.

This article aims at exploring the patterns of stability and change in Spain’s institutional settings during the years of economic crisis until 2017. By “institutional settings”, I mean the party system and the structure of party competition, and the reform (or non-reform) of institutions that require consent from political actors. As an analytical tool to assess the degree of change I will use the term “Second Transition” as used in the current academic, political and media discourses in Spain. That may appear counter-intuitive, as the term itself is multi-faceted and thus lacks conceptual coherence; however, in the following section I will try to decode the term’s diverse meanings.

2. TRANSITION AND “SECOND TRANSITION” DISCOURSE IN SPAIN

Spain’s peaceful transition to democracy had long been considered an exemplary case for overcoming authoritarian rule, both within its borders and in the international scientific community (Tusell, Lamo, and Pardo 1996; Ortiz Heras, 2004, pp. 223-242). For a country that had lacked institutional stability during the greater part of the 20^th century, its result is regarded as exceptional. There are no doubts that the consensus-orientated attitudes of political elites, even on the fringes of the political spectrum, were key to overcoming the historic cleavages that led to the outbreak of the civil war (1936-1939), and which were only superficially domesticized during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939-1975). Representatives of the old regime and members of the (exiled) democratic opposition managed to agree on an amnesty law, a series of socio-economic pacts (pactos de Moncloa) and – above all – the democratic constitution of 1978, still in place today. This achievement, unlikely when considering the profound ideological differences between the actors involved, was made possible thanks to explicitly excluding debates or references to the country’s past turmoil.

As Spain had lacked any previous uncontested democratic experience, the transition process with its “spirit of concordance” soon established itself as the founding myth of the new democratic system. Avilés Farré (2002, p. 97) calls it a “national lieu de la mémoire”. Politicians would frequently appeal to the “spirit of the transition” when looking for non-partisan support for their initiatives; or, when unsuccessful, denounce the opposition for breaking it.

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 PP dominated the political landscape at a regional level. Twelve of the 17 regional heads of government were party members.

However, as the new government’s structural reforms (see next section) did not show immediate effect, with the number of unemployed rising well above the 5 million threshold, and the governing party facing severe allegations of corruption and illegal financing, support for Rajoy and his party declined drastically in the December 2015 election. As almost 3.5 million voters turned its back on the PP, the party’s share of the vote fell from 44,6 per cent to 28,7, losing 63 MPs and in consequence its absolute majority in parliament. Thanks to an ambiguous position regarding post-electoral coalitions with populist and nationalist forces, and a too aggressive candidate, the Socialist managed to underbid their 2011 result, already the worst since 1977. The party declined by six percentage points in the vote share to 22, losing twenty of its 110 seats in parliament. Two newcomers were the winners of the election. Pablo Iglesias’s Podemos party secured over a fifth of the vote share and 69 MPs (regional electoral alliances included), although a success had been expected due to its (then surprising) achievement in the elections to the European Parliament the year before. Albert Rivera, the dominant figure in the Ciudadanos (“citizens”) party, even showed signs of disappointment as the first post-election polls indicated 40 seats in parliament and fourteen per cent of the vote.

The result of the 2015 elections altered the structure of the party system (see Table 2). While both fragmentation and volatility rose sharply compared to the previous vote, electoral concentration – which still stood at the 1977-2008 average in 2011 – fell by fourteen percentage points. As Podemos defends policy positions left of the PSOE in both the economic and center-periphery cleavage, polarization increased. The 10-month political gridlock caused by the three runner-ups’ unwillingness to help PP-candidate Mariano Rajoy into office as well as their incapability to form an alternative government, does not seem to have changed this new pattern.

Table 2. The Spanish party system, pre- and post-crisis. Source: Delgado Sotillos/López Nieto (2012) [1977-2008], own calculations [2011-2016]. ¹Number of parties ²ENP, Laakso&Taagpepera ³Net gains/losses of all parties, ⁴Vote share of the two biggest parties, in percentage points.

Remarkable low volatility in the 2015-16 comparison indicates a temporary stabilization of an effective three-and-a half party system.

When taking into account the structure of party competition, however, a different picture emerges. Peter Mair’s (2014, pp. 286-292) concept looks at three factors linked to the way parties compete for government office (see Table 3).

	Structure of Competition is
	Closed	Open
Pattern of alternation in government	Wholesale alternation or nonalternation	Partial alternation
Types of governing formulas	Familiar	Innovative
Access to government office	Restricted to few parties	Open to many parties
Examples	United KingdomNew Zealand, to mid-1990sJapan, 1955-1993Ireland, 1948-1989	The NetherlandsDenmarkNewly emerging partysystems

Table 3. Structure of party competition and the pattern of alternation in government. Source: Mair (2014), p. 291.

In all three categories, the “traditional” closed mode of Spanish party competition prevails during the last decade. Alternation in government follows the wholesale (2011) or nonalternation pattern (in 2015 and 2016). Governing formulas are (still) the absolute majority government (2011) or minority government with temporal third-party support in the legislative area (2015 and 2016). The fact that since 2016 Rajoy’s government has not only depended on one or more nationalist parties for legislative support, but as well on a nationwide formation like Cuidadanos does not meet the requirement of an “innovative” formula. Ultimately, access to government office still is limited to just two parties (PSOE and PP).

In a first conclusion, the Spanish case seems to constitute an example of a changed party system structure induced by electoral change, while both do not affect the structure of competition for government, which has remained intact since 1982. While questioning if one could speak of any systemic effect under these circumstances at all, Mair explains this possible outcome with the choices of party elites, party strategy, and the effect a closed competition structure itself has for electoral alignments. This last factor seems to especially play an important role in the Spanish case, as voters expressed their attachment for the established party system at the very moment that a major shift in the pattern of formation of government had seemed possible.

4. INSTITUTIONAL AND POLICY REFORM

As mentioned above, by institutional reform I understand any modification within the polity dimension of the Spanish democracy, i. e. the change of rules and norms that function as the basis for public institutions and which in turn require a mandate from policy makers to be implemented. When the (political) consequences of the economic crisis began to kick in, Lamo de Espinosa (2011, 62), taking up the public debate in Spain at that time, outlined the need for institutional reform in four areas: (1) Political parties, (2) lower house of Parliament, (3) Justice system, and (4) State of the autonomies.

1. Against the backdrop of numerous corruption cases, political parties were confronted by demands for transparency measures. Lawmakers reacted and the party law was changed in 2012 and 2015. In the new regime, parties have less state money to spend on electoral propaganda, corporate donations are prohibited, foundations linked to parties face stricter scrutinizing, and parties themselves – and not only single party members – are subject to criminal law when found guilty of wrongdoing. However, these new stipulations seem not to have lived up to the debate about political parties in the public and academia. There is consensus that political parties exercise too much control over administration and the intermediate system. Detractors of the transition even state that the dominant role of party elites during the transition granted them a status in public life that prevented the development of a fully functioning civil society. To strengthen intra-party democracy and limit the party elites’ scope for co-optation, proposals for yearly conventions – instead of the four-year cycle the party law foresees – were made. The weakening of party leadership at the expense of their base was expected to increase “competition for minds” within the factions. Until now, just PSOE and Podemos have held primary elections for appointing their secretary generals, the latter using a closed list system.

2. Virtually all factions in the Congreso de los Diputados agreed at the end of 2012 that the rules of procedure for the lower chamber of Parliament – in place since 1982 – should be updated to “improve democracy” (Europa Press, 2012). Several parliamentary groups filed motions to reform the rules of procedure (Congreso de los Diputados, 2012-2016), e.g. waiving the government’s veto power against legislation affecting the budget, force the PM or its ministers to answer MP questions face to face in Parliament, ease popular initiatives (Iniciativa Legislative Popular, ILP), and strengthen lobby control. It resulted that inter-party consensus crumbled when it came to detail, with all these initiatives ultimately failing.

3. Advocates of a more effective checks-and-balances system place high hopes in judicial reform. The judiciary should, in their eyes, function as a political restraint. Always in the centre of debates stands the Consejo General del Poder Judicial (CGPJ), the constitutional body that governs Spain’s judges. While the former minister for Justice, Alberto Ruiz Gallardon, seemed to favor the magistrates themselves elect their peers (as it was the rule up to 1985), at the end of 2012, a law was passed that maintained members be appointed by the Senate and Parliament. Although the 2012 regulation has been consented with the Socialist Party, frequent rows about the composition of the CGPJ remain. The same applies for Spain’s Constitutional Court.

4. At the beginning of 2012, the PP government set up a “Commission for the Reform of Public Administration (Comisión para la Reforma de la Administración Pública, CORA) aimed at reducing (political) bureaucracy, slashing positions in the public sector and controlling public spending at a regional level. After the PSOE had voiced opposition to a reform of local constitutions, eyes turned to the 17 Autonomous Regions (Comunidades Autonomas). In four years, almost 800 regional entities have been abolished or merged, saving the tax payers two billion Euros, according to the Ministry of Finance (MINHAFP, 2016). The government, however, did not manage to find allies for more ambitious proposals, such as the abolition of provincial diputaciones or the government delegates in the regions. Power sharing and the delegation of power from the national government to the regional administrations remain at the forefront of the political debate in Spain’s asymmetrical “State of the Autonomies”. Frequent rows occur over regional financing, state investments in the regions and devolution. Against the backdrop of an independence bid by Catalonia’s ruling coalition, the Socialist Party proposes constitutional reform for a redefinition of the regions’ status within the Spanish state. The PSOE proposal for federalism, however, meets strong resistance from the Conservative side due to its recognition of a “plurinational” character of the nation.

Even when an inter-party consensus on reforms exists, implementation is not secure. In August 2016, the speakers of Ciudadanos and PP in Parliament signed an agreement titled, “Anti-corruption pact. Measures for democratic regeneration and against corruption”. The document had been the precondition for Ciudadanos’ votes in the investiture of Mariano Rajoy. Both parties agreed to end legal immunity for politicians and public servants, eliminate the legal figure of government pardon, limit the PM’s time in office to two terms, oblige politicians to step down once they face formal corruption allegations, and draft a new electoral law (aimed at increasing proportionality and introducing an open-list-system). Despite the negotiations originally being limited to three months, a year down the line no substantial progress in either of the areas has been made. Whether the constitution must be changed to implement these policies – as the government party claims – or the regular legal proceedings are sufficient is the major contentious issue.

5. CONCLUSION

In the Spanish political class, as well as in academia and the public, a widespread consensus exists that amidst the fiercest economic crisis since democracy was restored in 1978, changes must be made in the nation’s institutional setting. On the one hand, the popularity of the term “Second Transition” in current-day debates indicates nostalgia for a past when politicians – regardless of their ideological camp – could agree on bold policy measures. For some, this part of the history should serve as an example to the political class in their striving to overcome current woes. On the other hand, “Second Transition” is interpreted by those who – thanks to the economic crisis – now manage to play a part in Spanish politics as chiffre for the disruptive political program that Spain (allegedly) did not experience in the late 1970s. In this view, the entire foundation for democracy in Spain must be reset. Both camps face the pressure of public opinion. Citizen’s contempt for politics stands at an all-time high.

It is thus surprising that besides a rather timid reform of the party law, no major institutional reform project has been implemented – this, despite public demand and assurance by the parties themselves. In this paper, I have suggested that a possible explanation may be the unchanged structure of party competition for government during the years of economic crisis. In this scenario, the current government (and the first opposition party) may rate the benefits of closed competition higher than adopting reforms that ultimately could open the contest for government in the future.

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