A Study in Self-Inflicted Wounds

How a unified Right came apart, and what it now takes to reassemble a majority.

Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 2 of 8

The second half of our PP story opens on the worst morning in modern Spanish history. On 11 March 2004, three days before a general election the Popular Party expected to win comfortably, an Al-Qaeda cell detonated bombs on Madrid’s commuter rail. Roughly 200 people died; it remains the deadliest terrorist attack the European Union has ever suffered, larger than Paris or London, and yet curiously less fixed in the international memory. We try to hold two things at once here: the human tragedy of 11M, mourned every year much as the United States mourns its own September date, and the political rupture that followed it.

In 72 hours an electorate that was set to re-elect a government turned and removed it. How much of that swing was authentic moral revulsion at a governing party that had first blamed ETA, and how much was a coordinated campaign to pin the dead of Atocha on Aznar’s alignment with Washington, is the question we sit with rather than resolve. What is not in dispute is that the left learned something that morning about the uses of the streets, and that the school of Zapatero was founded in those three days.

From there the episode becomes, in large part, an extended meditation on a single man and a single temperament. Mariano Rajoy governed the Spanish right for fourteen years, from the shock of 2004 to the no-confidence vote of 2018, and we make the case that his defining gift and his defining flaw were the same thing: a genius for staying still. He won the largest victory in the party’s history in 2011, one hundred and eighty-six seats, and yet that triumph rested on a collapsed Socialist government and twenty-five per cent unemployment rather than on any positive enthusiasm for him. The “technocrat” label, which in English flatters and in Spanish insults, captures the puzzle. We trace the ideological inconsistencies that hollowed out the party’s credibility: opposition to same-sex marriage later quietly abandoned, a Historical Memory Law denounced in opposition and never repealed in power, tax cuts promised and thirty tax rises delivered. Whatever one’s own position on each issue, the pattern corrodes trust, and trust, once spent, does not return.

The Catalan crisis of 2017 is where we locate the real fracture. Faced with an illegal referendum staged with plastic ballot boxes, Rajoy reached for the judges and reached for Article 155 of the Constitution only after the fact, when the political moment had passed. It fell to King Felipe VI to give what was effectively a political speech, and to the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, not the prime minister, to headline the great unity rally in the streets of Barcelona. Separatism has fallen since, but the lesson voters drew about their own government’s passivity proved expensive. We argue this is the moment the big tent that Fraga built and Aznar perfected began to come apart, scattering its classical-liberal and conservative occupants toward Ciudadanos and Vox.

The final part of the episode is a study in self-inflicted wounds. The Gürtel corruption affair was real but local, and the party’s failure to defend the figures later acquitted of every charge.

Then came Pablo Casado, young, articulate, genuinely a man of ideas, who destroyed himself in 2022 by moving against Isabel Díaz Ayuso over allegations we find, having seen the dossier, remarkably thin. Which leaves the strangest fact in Spanish politics today, and the one we keep circling: the most popular figure on the Spanish right does not lead it. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the overly-cautious Galician brought in as the adult in the room, has stabilised the party and brokered an uneasy coexistence with Vox, but excites no one. Ayuso, who may simply not want the job for reasons that are as much personal as strategic, remains the star.

We close on the party’s own 2025 self-description, “centro reformista,” a phrase that means precisely nothing, and on the road to 2027, where the only thing certain is that voters will be excitedly embracing PP but unambiguously signaling no more Sánchez.

Next in the series: Vox.