The left holds on

The expected landslide electoral turnaround did not happen in Andalusia. A clear majority in the regional parliament eluded the Popular Party (PP), and the left still holds Spain’s most populous region. The Socialist Party (PSOE), now headed by Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, is in a position to form a coalition government with the United Left (IU), to which most of the disenchanted Socialist voters have obviously turned. IU has doubled the number of seats it holds in the regional parliament, and holds the key to a possible coalition.

The PSOE, with 47 seats, and IU, with 12, are in a position to form a coalition government — something that happened 18 years ago but came to nothing, given that the IU chose to collaborate with the PP on the national level in a “pincer movement” against the Socialists during the last two years of the national government of Felipe González (1994-1996). Now the occasion seems more propitious, the Andalusian IU seeming disinclined to cast its parliamentary votes in favor of a PP regional government, as the regional IU did last year in Extremadura.

The Andalusian PSOE leader Antonio Griñán’s decision — much questioned within the party — to separate the regional elections from the national ones held last November 20 seems to have borne fruit. It would probably have gone worse for the PSOE, had the regional and national elections coincided. The setback that the Socialists have nevertheless suffered in Andalusia is due to both national and regional causes. Recent months have seen extensive publicity about corruption in the Andalusian regional administration, revealing a state of affairs that a future government of the left will have to take measures to control.

The regional PP leader Javier Arenas, who has survived previous defeats, has achieved good electoral results this time, but still not enough to put him in power. Arenas, who has often repeated that his days in national-level politics are over, will now have to decide whether to run again at the regional level in 2016, or step aside for someone else.

Anyone’s game in Asturias

Meanwhile, in the northern region of Asturias, the “second round” of the inconclusive elections held last May has not served to resolve the difficult situation of the regional conservatives (divided into the PP, and a PP faction, under the leadership of Francisco Álvarez-Cascos), who are still incapable of making a coalition deal after 10 months of Cascos’ shaky non-government.

A pact is obviously necessary, and the national-level PP, in the words of its secretary-general, María Dolores de Cospedal, seems well disposed to the idea. The PP’s apparent strategy of elbowing out its most vehemently anti-Cascos members suggests that an agreement will now be easier to reach. FAC (Cascos’ formation) and the PP now have, together, fewer seats than they had before, but still enough to form a regional government, pending the final count of absentee votes. It is now incumbent on them to form one, and thus rescue the region from the paralysis in which it has lately been plunged by a right-wing split into factions and unable to reach agreement — quarreling for reasons in which personal rancor ranks highly. The Asturian electorate, traditionally of the left, has already voted twice in favor of the conservatives, who must now show that they are capable of shouldering the responsibility the voters have given them.

The correlation of forces with respect to the previous situation is, however, significantly different. The electorate has given Álvarez-Cascos a light punishment, and his slate was not the one which obtained most votes, while the PSOE has held out and, indeed, been the winner, or at least the most-voted party, in these elections. The discreet leadership of Javier Fernández, highly rated in opinion polls, has arrested the PSOE’s downward trend in Asturias, where this party previously governed for almost 25 years. That the PSOE may now govern alone, supposing the right cannot mend their differences, is not an unlikely possibility, in which case the party-splitting adventure of Álvarez-Cascos will have come to a dead end.

The split in the regional right has favored Fernández. What was to be expected, in view of the general nationwide free fall of the PSOE, was that such a split would be exploited mainly by the IU — which, however, has obtained a result similar to that of last May, while Fernández has proved capable of profiting from the ongoing political crisis in Asturias.

Time for real decisions

One worrying aspect of Sunday’s elections is the high degree of abstention. Voter participation in Andalusia approached the historic low of 1990, and gives an idea of the reticence of a large part of the electorate, in the face of an economic situation that elected governments seem unable to control. And while not in such a highly pronounced manner, the abstention phenomenon also seems to affect Asturias. A sector of the electorate seems weary of being called to the polls again and again, without any visible results, when it comes to resolving the issues that it most cares about: unemployment and the economic situation in general.

On the day after the elections, the Popular Party is still the hegemonic political force in Spain, and still bears the responsibility of governing. But electorally it is beginning to suffer the effects of the negative situation that it is supposed to be doing something about.

For the head of the government, Mariano Rajoy, the time has come for real decisions. The elections are over, and the general strike to be held on Thursday is the only politically charged event in sight for the government before it presents the budget and defines in detail the full extent of its plans in the face of the poor economic prospects, and the redoubled doubts on the financial solvency of Spain.