Spain welcomes new king but says goodbye to two-party political system
Anna Sonny, 20 June 2014
It’s been an odd week for Spain, with the juxtaposition of another horrendous defeat in the World Cup on Wednesday and the coronation of new King Felipe VI on Thursday. After the reigning champions from the 2010 World Cup lost 2-0 to Chile, thousands of Spaniards gathered outside the Royal Palace in Madrid the following day to greet the new King, his wife Letizia, and their two daughters, Leonor and Sofia.
King Juan Carlos announced his abdication earlier this month, saying he wanted to make way for a new generation. In a televised speech, Juan Carlos lamented the effects of the economic crisis on the country (which still linger in the form of a 26% unemployment rate), saying it had damaged the social fabric of Spain – something he didn’t seem to pay much attention to when he went off on a luxurious elephant-hunting trip in Botswana in the midst of the recession’s grip on the country in 2012.
Although the monarchy has been marred by such scandals, Juan Carlos is remembered as a key figure in Spain’s transition to democracy during the 1970s, following the heavily oppressive dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. Spain’s establishment as a constitutional monarchy in 1978 was intended to encourage stability, and the two main political parties at the time – Adolfo Suarez’s Union of the Democratic Centre and Felipe Gonzalez’s Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE) – although occupying the centre-right and the left respectively, had to work together with the King in order to usher in democracy.
But as this era fades, with the abdication of Juan Carlos and the recent demise of Adolfo Suarez, the former prime minister of Spain who played a key role in Spain’s transition to democracy in the post-Franco era, so too does the era of the dominance of Spain’s political scene by the country’s two main political parties.
As the recent European elections showed, change is certainly afoot in Spain’s political landscape, with many hailing the results as the end of ‘bipartidismo’ (bipartisanship). The Popular Party (PP), which occupies the ideological space left open by the disbanding of the UCD 1983 and PSOE, together lost more than five million votes compared to the 2009 election. Moreover, the four-month-old political party Podemos (We Can), born out of the indignados movement that emerged from the Spanish protests of 2011-2, won five out of Spain’s fifty-four seats in the European Parliament.
King Felipe used his coronation speech to address ever-rising nationalist sentiment in the Basque and Catalan regions, calling for all Spaniards to embrace their differences and unite. He ended his speech by pointedly thanking those present in four languages: Castilian, Catalan, Basque, and Galician. But while the King focuses on unity amongst the Spanish people, the reigning political dominance of the PP and the PSOE now finds itself under threat.