A Pandemic, Freedom, and the most right-wing metropolis in Western Europe: Notes on the Madrid regional election.
On Tuesday, May 4, the region of Madrid voted in a snap election called by regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso (from the Conservative Partido Popular — PP) after breaking its governing coalition with Ciudadanos (center-right Liberal). The election was a clear victory for Díaz Ayuso, whose party more than doubled its seats, from 30 to 65, 3 seats short of an absolute majority. In all likelihood, she will be reelected regional president, either in coalition with Vox (Populist Radical Right), or with its abstention. The three parties of the Left were defeated in a context of high mobilization of voters, since the small gains of Más Madrid (Left-Green) and Unidas Podemos (New Left + Communists) did not offset the significant losses of the Socialist Party (PSOE, Center-Left, currently in government in Spain, in coalition with Podemos), who went from first to third party. The biggest loser of the night was Ciudadanos, who, having lost 500,000 votes and 16% of the share since the previous election, failed to clear the 5% threshold and will no longer sit in the regional parliament.
1. THE PANDEMIC: The timing of this election was essential. It happened with vaccinations moving forward at full speed , a stabilized epidemiological situation (Madrid’s worse than Spain’s average, but still stable), and an acute feeling of tiredness. In this context, the Conservative candidate’s message of ‘Freedom’ and keeping bars and restaurants open worked well. It would not necessarily have worked twelve months earlier, or six months later, so we should not infer too much from this. Spain had four regional elections in different moments of the pandemic (Galicia, Basque Country, Catalonia and Madrid). All of them resulted in the same governing party as before (pending the formation of a government in Catalonia). It is hard to attribute the results mostly to the Central government’s management of the pandemic, which is largely at the hands of regions since June 2020, but this issue has been more prominent in Madrid than in any other regional election. By the way, other Conservative-led regions, like Galicia, Andalusia and Murcia, have had much more restrictive approaches than Madrid, and better epidemiological results, so the ‘freedom’ message has been sold as a ‘Madrid’ rather than ‘PP’ position. What Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s (the Madrid Conservative leader) narrative did achieve, though, was stealing that ‘freedom’ banner from the extreme right: Vox could not campaign mostly on this theme.
2. THE LANDSLIDE: The Conservative (PP) landslide victory, broadly foreseen in polls, came mostly at the expense of Ciudadanos, which is now close to disappearing. Ciudadanos (a small party born in Catalonia to challenge Catalan nationalism with Spanish nationalism) emerged in the Spanish scene in 2014 with a centrist, pro-European discourse (a reformist response to Podemos’ early success, backed by important parts of the media and economic establishment). With the 2015–2017 Catalan crisis, Ciudadanos shifted to Spanish nationalism and dreamt of competing for the hegemony of the Center-Right. They never had a real chance on the former once Vox emerged, or on the latter against PP. Following local and regional elections in May 2019, they refused any agreement with the Socialists, in order to keep their rightist credentials intact. They lost 80% of their seats in the national parliament in the national election of December 2019. The attempt to go back to the center of their new leader, Inés Arrimadas, backfired, and Ciudadanos is now extremely weak. Interestingly, almost all their voters went to PP. The Socialists’ attempt to play the moderate card in Madrid to woo former Ciudadanos’ voters failed. Ciudadanos was not seen as a ‘Center’ party for some time: voters’ perception of Ciudadanos moved rapidly to the Right between 2015 and 2019. Conservatives knew all that, and this is why they called the Madrid snap election in order to punish Ciudadanos for changing horses in the Murcia region over corruption scandals and attempting to form an alternative government with the Socialists. The Conservatives, by the way, preempted that change in the Murcia region by buying the defection of three Ciudadanos’ regional MPs with regional ministerial posts for them, and one regional ministerial post for a Vox defector MP, and thus kept the region’s government.
3. RIGHT AND LEFT: Yesterday the Right-Left balance in Madrid’s regional election switched by 3% towards the Right compared to the 2019 regional election, which is in fact a move back towards the average of the last 3 or 4 regional elections. Whereas most large urban areas in Europe lean to the Left of the national average, Madrid tilts consistently to its Right. While this is not unheard of in Europe (Boris Johnson was the mayor of London, Valérie Précresse presides over Île de France), it is exceptional in having been the case for over two decades. Madrid is also exceptional as a large metropolitan area for its above-average levels of extreme Right (Vox) vote in national elections. In this context, the Right-Left balance is less affected that the balance within the Right. The balance within the Left also changed: the Socialist party had a very bad result (partly the price of being in national government, partly the wrong strategy and a bad candidate), and it was narrowly overtaken by a left-green party (Más Madrid), who, together with Podemos, recovered a substantial part of the vote lost by the Socialists. Pablo Iglesias, the charismatic founding leader of Podemos, left the Vice-Presidential post of the Spanish government to fight the regional election, saving his party from the brink of the 5% representation threshold. He resigned on election night, seeing that the Left failed to oust PP. After 7 years shaking Spain’s political scene, Iglesias had become the lightning rod for virulent attacks from the Right, and has now opened room for a new leadership at Podemos and, perhaps, a closer cooperation of all the political space to the left of the Socialists.
4. EXTREME RIGHT: Leaving Ciudadanos for dead, the Conservatives decided to compete on the solid Right, leaving relatively little space for the populist radical right of Vox to grow. The ‘freedom’ message against restrictions and the associated ideas (‘the champion of bar owners’, for instance), left the extreme right without themes that they exploit elsewhere in Europe. The other messages were typical economic issues (lower taxes, choice, freedom from government intervention) combined with a new discourse of Madrid as a) having a particular culture in relation to the rest of Spain (‘more open and free’) and b) being the victim of the Spanish governments preference for other parts of Spain (a classic of peripheral nationalism in Spain). Vox was thus starved of oxygen, and did not grow as much as feared (it grew from 7.6 to 9.2%, far from 18.5% they reached in Madrid at the December 2019 national election). However, as in Murcia, Vox comes out of this election in a stronger position, the only remaining possible support to a PP that is still short of absolute majorities everywhere but in Galicia.
5. NEW RIGHT: The Conservatives are likely to keep encouraging defections from Ciudadanos, or perhaps push for full integration, maybe starting with a coalition (although yesterday’s Madrid election taught them it might be more expeditious to simply swallow their voter base). The Madrid and Murcia example will encourage the leadership to move to the Right — and that was the original selling point of the national leader Pablo Casado since he won the primaries — and start dealing with the other threat to their hegemony, Vox. This means that they will probably increase the volume on nationalism and national identity (for instance, bullfighting), anti-immigration, recentralization, anti-feminism, low taxes, law and order, and other topics that Vox champions. If this works, we may see, as in Austria and Greece, a weaker populist radical Right, and a stronger but more populist and radical mainstream Right. The resistance to this shift of the Conservative party further to the Right from other regions (especially Galicia and Andalusia) will be weaker, after the success of PP’s strategy in Madrid. The Conservative party (PP) feels that it has the wind in its sails after this election, and it will push hard to weaken the current national coalition government. What we have seen in Spain is an acceleration of the cycle of emergence of the extreme right, challenge to the mainstream right, and move of the mainstream right towards extreme right positions to limit the space for its radical challenger. This cycle in Austria took decades, in Greece eight years, and in Spain may be complete in three or four.
6. FREEDOM!: Public perception and priorities about the management of the pandemic have shifted, and will keep shifting, so it is hard to see its effect in one direction that can illuminate broader European trends. The reminiscences of the ‘freedom’ discourse — or putting economy before people, as its critics call it — connect well to traditional neo-con and neo-liberal discourse embraced by the Right in the USA and Latin America (to which the Spanish Right is as closely linked as with the European right, if not more). There probably is a reason Matteo Salvini was quick to congratulate not Vox but Conservative leader Díaz Ayuso: success in itself generates powerful narratives, including around the pandemic. And these narratives connect well to past and future ambitions of the renewed Spanish Right.
Perhaps the most important lesson is relevant well beyond the pandemic. The campaign on ‘open bars’ in Madrid may be a foretaste of future political battles. The freedom from pandemic restrictions will be replaced by the freedom to drive everywhere, to fly for holidays, to buy and sell without care for the ecological price. And the common good to preserve will not be public health, but the health of the planet. The pandemic will pass, but this tension will stay with us. In that, the Spanish Right may diverge considerably from the German Right.