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The March 2000 General Election in Spain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Elisa Roller
Elisa Roller*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

España Va Bien. ‘Things Are Going Well In Spain.’ With This Simple yet somewhat unoriginal slogan, the incumbent conservative Partido Popular (PP) swept to victory by absolute majority in the 12 March 2000 general election in Spain. The PP's astounding victory may be attributed to several factors. First, its own well-organized campaign was based upon a strong leadership, something the two main leftist parties lacked. As the experience of the former centrist party, Unión Centro Democrático (UCD) shows, party leadership does matter. Secondly, leadership charisma, so important in the 1993 election when the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) managed to be re-elected despite worryingly high unemployment figures and a wave of political scandals, seemed to matter little or nothing in the March 2000 election. Effective management skills and strong leadership seem to have replaced populist charisma as a way to attract the average Spanish voter.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , April 2001 , pp. 209 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2001

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References

1 Adolfo Suárez’s resignation as prime minister in 1981 led to the party’s disastrous results in the 1982 general election.

2 Between 1996 and 2000, the PP pushed through many of the privatization initiatives embarked on by the previous PSOE government, raising an estimated 4 trillion pesetas (approx. £18 billion). El País, 18 January 2000.

3 The coalition took office despite the PP being the party with most votes in the region.

4 This proposed fiscal formula would lead to the redistribution of public spending where 40 per cent would be spent by the central government, 30 per cent by the governments of the autonomous communities and 30 per cent by local administration.

5 This pact included the PSC, ERC and the Catalan leftist-green coalition of Iniciativa per Catalunya-Els Verds (IC-V). El País, 20 January 2000.

6 El País, 29 January 2000.

7 The Economist, 29 January 2000.

8 An agreement signed between Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalist forces that demanded greater recognition of Spain’s multinational character, a greater role in the EU’s decision-making process, protection and promotion of minority languages and cultures, and institutional reform.

9 El País, 12 March 2000.

10 The opinion polls mostly projected the PP’s share of the vote to oscillate between 41 per cent and 42 per cent while the PSOE’s share of the vote was predicted to be between 36 per cent and 37 per cent (El País, 13 March 2000).

11 The other 51 Senators are appointed by the autonomous communities.

12 These parties are often condescendingly referred to as partidos sucursalistas or franchise parties (the Catalan branch of a Spanish party) by other nationalist parties.

13 Elisa Roller, ‘The 1997 Llei del Català: A Pandora’s Box in Catalonia?’, in Regional and Federal Studies, 11:2, forthcoming Summer 2001.

14 Roller, Elisa, ‘The October 1999 Elections in Catalonia: End of Nationalist Dominance in Catalan Politics?’, in International Journal of Iberian Studies, 13:2 (Autumn 2000), pp. 109–21.Google Scholar

15 Marfany, Joan-Lluis, La Cultura del Catalanisme, Barcelona, Editorial Empúries, 1995.Google Scholar

16 Santiago Pérez-Nievas and Marta Fraile, ‘Is the Nationalist Vote Really Nationalist? Dual Voting in Catalonia 1980–1999’, Working Paper 2000/147 Instituto Juan March de Estudios e Investigaciones, 2000; see also, Roller, Elisa, ‘The October 1999 Elections in Catalonia: End of Nationalist Dominance in Catalan Politics?’, in International Journal of Iberian Studies, 13:2 (Autumn 2000), pp. 109–21.Google Scholar

17 de Rafael, Gonzalo Herranz, ‘An Empirical Survey of Social Structure and Nationalistic Identification in Spain in the 1990s’, in Nations and Nationalism, 4:1 (01 1998), pp. 35–59.Google Scholar

18 Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Survey September–November 1999; El País, 2 May 2000.

19 José Ignacio Wert, ‘Las verdades del 12-M’, El País, 8 April 2000.

20 El Mundo, El País, El Periódico de Catalunya, 13 March 2000.

21 José Ignacio Wert, ‘Las verdades del 12-M’, El País, 8 April 2000.

22 The term ‘new’ voters refers to young people voting for the first time.

23 El País, 17 April 2000.

24 Richard Gunther and José Ramón Montero, ‘The Anchors of Partisanship: A Comparative Analysis of Voting Behaviour in Four Southern European Democracies’, Working Paper 2000/150, Instituto Juan March de Estudios e Investigaciones, 2000.

25 Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Survey No. 2387, March 2000.

26 Ibid.

27 Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Survey No. 2398, September 2000.

28 Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Survey No. 2387, March 2000.

29 Although its Catalan counterpart, IC-V, did manage to gain one seat.

30 Indeed, during the electoral campaign, opinion polls showed that both IU and PSOE voters were almost evenly split on the perceived benefits of the pact, with 52 per cent in favour of the pact and 47 per cent against (El País, 2 February 2000).

31 El País, 13 March 2000.

32 El País, 25 February 2000.

33 El País, 14 March 2000.

34 Author’s translation.

35 The PSE is the Basque branch of the PSOE.

36 The Economist, 11 March 2000 and Financial Times, 13 June 2000.

37 El País, 18 January 2000 and The Economist, 11 March 2000.

38 The Madrid stock exchange has risen from approx. 345.87 points in March 1996 to 1,014.62 in January 2000 (El País, 18 January 2000).

39 Inflation, although less than the 3.2 per cent in 1996, more than doubled from 1998 to 1999, from 1.4 per cent to 2.9 per cent (El País, 18 January 2000).

40 Villalonga was made chairman of Telefónica by Aznar when it was still state-owned and was a target by the PSOE during the campaign. Telefónica and its associated companies constitute more than a quarter of the value of the Madrid stock exchange (The Economist, 11 March 2000), highlighting both the limited extent to which competition has been introduced among Spain’s top companies and the close links between Spanish business and politics.