Spanish elections and politics III / Pedro Sánchez faces a new term as PM

[palandio]

Link to the old thread for those who want to read the old posts:

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=313463.2200

[palandio]

Sorry if this has already been asked, but maybe some more knowledgeable posters can answer this:

Why has right-of-center moderate Catalanism become electorally unviable? It seems that a part of former CiU voters embraced Puigdemont's radicalization on the Catalan question and his tentatives to swallow the rest of the pro-independence spectrum; while the rest of CiU's once formidable 30-40% completely jumped ship. Uniò running alone, PDeCAT running alone, PNC, etc. all failed miserably. Superficially one might expect a big void at that place in the Catalan political landscape, but there seem to be no voters in that place.

[palandio]

Maybe this is just me as a foreigner applying commonplaces to a situation where they may not apply, but Southern Spain trending right and Northern Spain trending (slightly) left does not surprise me for the following reasons:

Southern Spain was dominated by large agricultural estates and numerically by landless farmworkers, whereas in Northern Spain (and particularly Galicia, I think) smallholders dominated. This is the main explanation why the South voted for the Left and the North for the Right. The importance of agriculture (at least with respect to the voting workforce) is now only a fraction of what it was in the past. Therefore the cleavage lives on only in the form of political tradition and inertia, but can be supplanted by more salient cleavages. A rural area in the South and in the North nowadays have a priori much more in common than they had in the past, and it should not surprise that their voting patterns are becoming more similar.

There are certain factors that can work in favor of eroding inherited political traditions or against it. Societal and demographic change works in favor, e.g. in coastal regions like pointed out by icc. Political polarization works in favor, and in Spain polarization seems to be bigger than for example in Germany, where the CDU's and the SPD's absolute strongholds lie directly next to each other and are hard to distinguish from each other apart from their religious denomination. New cleavages can accelerate the erosion of older cleavages.

I think that the issue brought up by tack, i.e. a reaction against peripheral nationalism could play a role in being a new cleavage. My impression is that this reaction in the poorer regions may be less motivated by feeling particularly 'culturally Spanish', but by a feeling that peripheral nationalism is egoistic and maybe also by a feeling of being particularly affected due to recent emigration of e.g. Andalusians to e.g. Catalonia.

Apart from that it has already mentioned above that processes like this are usually not uniform in space and time.