Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 8 of 8
In the final episode of our series on Spain’s political parties and ideologies, Diego and Rasheed turn to the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Canarian nationalist, regionalist and separatist parties, the forces that have shaped Spanish governance since 1978 while working, openly or by stages, to leave the state they help govern. The argument running through the conversation is that the constitutional bargain built to accommodate these movements has done the reverse of what its drafters hoped, with every concession feeding a larger demand and every hung parliament giving a handful of regional parties the power to decide budgets, legislation and the survival of national governments. We recorded it as Spain heads into a snap general election that followed separatist parties’ refusal to back the government’s housing decree.
We begin with Spain’s long history as a union of kingdoms and fueros, from the Catholic Monarchs to Philip V’s Nueva Planta decrees, and with Article 2 of the 1978 Constitution, whose undefined term “nacionalidades” was the price of Catalan and Basque support for the text. From there we look at the electoral arithmetic that lets regionally concentrated parties win seats in Congress at a fraction of the cost paid by national ones, and at why the Senate never became the territorial chamber it was supposed to be.
In Catalonia we follow the path from Jordi Pujol’s peix al cove and the 3% kickback scandal to the 2017 referendum and its collapse. We cover the rise of ERC and Gabriel Rufián, the demand for a financiación singular modelled on the Basque cupo, and the sudden rise of Sílvia Orriols’s Aliança Catalana, a party that is separatist, anti-immigration and, unusually, consistent. In the Basque Country we explain the concierto económico and its opaque formula, the PNV’s four decades in power, and EH Bildu, ETA’s political heir. Its predecessor Batasuna was banned in 2003, and Bildu now helps keep the Sánchez government in office. We close with Navarra and the Constitution’s Fourth Transitional Provision, Galicia’s BNG and the regionalist dominance of the PP there, and Coalición Canaria.
In this episode
Why Spaniards call their language castellano, and what Article 2 was meant to concede
How provincial seat allocation over-represents separatists in Congress and in the Parlament de Catalunya
The EU as an unintended argument for secession, from “Independence in Europe” to Kosovo
Nineteenth-century Catalan and Basque protectionism, and the claim that “Spain robs us” tested against territorial fiscal balances
Pujol, the 3% and the bourgeois roots of Catalan nationalism
The 2017 referendum, Article 155 and the disillusion that followed
Aliança Catalana and the collision between separatism and immigration
The Basque cupo, ETA’s more than 850 victims, and the legal line between Batasuna and Bildu
Arzalluz’s “some shake the tree, others gather the nuts”
Navarra, Galicia, the Canary Islands and the smaller regionalist parties
Should Andorra join Spain?