Why does Spain’s Partido Popular (the Popular Party) speak so many different political dialects at once — Madrid’s free-market libertarianism, Galicia’s institutional conservatism, the Christian democracy of its old guard — and yet remain the largest political party in Europe? In this opening installment of a new series on Spanish democracy, Diego and Rasheed argue that the answer lies not in incoherence but in DNA: PP is, and has always been, a coalition wearing the clothes of a party.
The conversation moves from the death of Franco in 1975 through the engineered transition under King Juan Carlos, the founding of Alianza Popular by the formidable and unelectable Manuel Fraga, the collapse of the centrist UCD, the failed “Roca Operation” through which Catalan economic elites tried to manufacture an alternative center-right, and finally the 1989 Sevilla congress where Fraga surrendered the stage to a then-obscure regional president named José María Aznar. Along the way: why a brilliant Francoist minister who helped draft the 1978 Constitution could never win a national election; how Margaret Thatcher personally berated Fraga over Spain’s vote on NATO; why the “Clan de Valladolid” outmaneuvered Fraga’s preferred successor, the glamorous Isabel Tocino, in a weekend confrontation at his Galician fishing house; and the case for Aznar as perhaps the most consequential pro-liberty Western leader of the late twentieth century outside Reagan and Thatcher.
Threaded through the narrative is a quieter argument about democratic self-restraint — Franco’s regime dissolving itself into a constitutional monarchy, Fraga stepping aside despite holding the party in his hand, Aznar imposing his own two-term limit at the peak of his power and keeping the promise — set against the unraveling of those unwritten rules in contemporary Spanish politics.
Part I closes on the eve of the 2004 election, with PP at its absolute majority and Mariano Rajoy chosen as Aznar’s successor by a finger pointed across the cabinet table. Part II picks up with what happened three days before the vote.