Spain: The Risk of Too High Expectations on the EU’s Role as a Problem Solver

Abstract

The pro-European sentiment that remains so dominant in Spain today constitutes an unlikely consensus in a country with deep political fractures both in ideology and territory. After the short period of the great constitutional agreements reached during the transition to democracy (1976–1979), the Spanish political system has adopted almost all features of majoritarian and conflict-ridden democracy regimes. This includes a style of tense relationships between the two big traditional parties (the social-democratic PSOE and the conservative PP) where there seems to be nothing to escape the confrontation. In addition to this, the long recession (2008–2013) ultimately linked to the eurozone debt crisis fuelled a rapid erosion of legitimacy of the entire polity and the emergence of a successful leftist anti-establishment party (‘Podemos’). In the specific case of Catalonia, economic depression and political unrest helped to feed an increasingly virulent independence conflict, including a distressing bid for unilateral secession by the Catalan nationalists who represent almost half of the region’s population which, in turn, led to a Spanish nationalist backlash and the growth of a right-wing populist party (‘Vox’) after 2017. No one would say that political forces as disparate and confronted as those that are present in this explosive combination of left-right or centre-periphery cleavages were to share an element as central to their political programme as that of the strong support for the European Union (EU). All of them do, although it seems obvious that their respective ideas about the European utopia diverge greatly from one another. Since each party expects too much, and very differently of the integration process, there is a risk that an almost certain frustration can feed discontent, and a Eurosceptic outbreak in the medium term.