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In the final episode of our series on Spain’s political parties and ideologies, Diego and Rasheed turn to the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Canarian nationalist and separatist parties, the forces that have shaped Spanish governance since 1978 while working, openly or by stages, to leave the state they help govern. The argument running through the conversation is that the constitutional bargain built to accommodate these movements has done the reverse of what its drafters hoped, with every concession feeding a larger demand and every hung parliament giving a handful of regional parties the power to decide budgets, legislation and the survival of national governments. We recorded it as Spain heads into a snap general election that followed separatist parties’ refusal to back the government’s housing decree.

We begin with Spain’s long history as a union of kingdoms and fueros, from the Catholic Monarchs to Philip V’s Nueva Planta decrees, and with Article 2 of the 1978 Constitution, whose undefined term “nacionalidades” was the price of Catalan and Basque support for the text. From there we look at the electoral arithmetic that lets regionally concentrated parties win seats in Congress at a fraction of the cost paid by national ones, and at why the Senate never became the territorial chamber it was supposed to be.

In Catalonia we follow the path from Jordi Pujol’s peix al cove and the 3% kickback scandal to the 2017 referendum and its collapse. We cover the rise of ERC and Gabriel Rufián, the demand for a financiación singular modelled on the Basque cupo, and the sudden rise of Sílvia Orriols’s Aliança Catalana, a party that is separatist, anti-immigration and, unusually, consistent. In the Basque Country we explain the concierto económico and its opaque formula, the PNV’s four decades in power, and EH Bildu, ETA’s political heir. Its predecessor Batasuna was banned in 2003, and Bildu now helps keep the Sánchez government in office. We close with Navarra and the Constitution’s Fourth Transitional Provision, Galicia’s BNG and the regionalist dominance of the PP there, and Coalición Canaria.

In this episode

• Why Spaniards call their language castellano, and what Article 2 was meant to concede
• How provincial seat allocation over-represents separatists in Congress and in the Parlament de Catalunya
• The EU as an unintended argument for secession, from “Independence in Europe” to Kosovo
• Nineteenth-century Catalan and Basque protectionism, and the claim that “Spain robs us” tested against territorial fiscal balances
• Pujol, the 3% and the bourgeois roots of Catalan nationalism
• The 2017 referendum, Article 155 and the disillusion that followed
• Aliança Catalana and the collision between separatism and immigration
• The Basque cupo, ETA’s more than 850 victims, and the legal line between Batasuna and Bildu
• Arzalluz’s “some shake the tree, others gather the nuts”
• Navarra, Galicia, the Canary Islands and the smaller regionalist parties
• Should Andorra join Spain?

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Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 7 of 8

Spain goes to the polls on 29 November with card-carrying communists in its cabinet, something almost unheard of elsewhere in Western Europe, and they did not appear from nowhere. After three episodes on the PSOE, Diego and Rasheed turn to everything to its left and follow a century of splits, mergers and rebrandings, from the founding of the Partido Comunista de España at the Comintern’s insistence to Sumar, Podemos and the protest camp now occupying the Puerta del Sol.

The founding grievance against the PSOE was its appetite for power, which the communists saw confirmed when Francisco Largo Caballero took a seat on Primo de Rivera’s Consejo de Estado. Under the Second Republic the CNT and the FAI treated the new regime as too bourgeois to defend, and when three CEDA ministers entered Lerroux’s cabinet in October 1934 the left answered with the Asturias revolution, put down by an army whose operations General Franco directed in defence of the Republic’s legal order. We revisit the narrow and disputed Popular Front victory of February 1936, examined by Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Roberto Villa García, and the war within the war in Republican Catalonia that sent George Orwell home from the POUM militia to write Homage to Catalonia.

Under Franco the communists were the only opposition with a real presence inside the country, through the maquis (stood down at Stalin’s urging), the clandestine Comisiones Obreras of Marcelino Camacho, and student agitators such as Ramón Tamames, the same Tamames whom Vox put forward against Pedro Sánchez in its 2023 motion of censure. The PCE condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and drifted towards Eurocommunism, and Santiago Carrillo, whose role in the Paracuellos killings of 1936 has never been settled, led the legalised party to nearly eleven per cent in 1979 before its collapse to four in 1982.

Julio Anguita, the Red Caliph of Córdoba, rebuilt that vote inside Izquierda Unida, a platform founded in 1986 in which the PCE remained the majority shareholder. His campaign against Socialist corruption drew accusations of a pinza with Aznar, and his opposition to Maastricht pushed the Nueva Izquierda faction towards the PSOE. Through Francisco Frutos, Gaspar Llamazares and Cayo Lara the space held a floor of about a million votes, and its best results always came in the years when the Socialists were collapsing.

The 15-M camps of May 2011 opened the way for a cohort of Complutense academics trained around Juan Carlos Monedero, whose CEPS foundation had advised Hugo Chávez and other Bolivarian governments. Pablo Iglesias, author of a doctoral thesis on civil disobedience and presenter of a programme on Iran’s HispanTV, and Íñigo Errejón, a close reader of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism, built Podemos on the language of la casta, a word that now belongs to Javier Milei. The party won 69 seats in December 2015 and absorbed Izquierda Unida, lost Errejón to Más Madrid, entered government with Sánchez in 2020, and lost Iglesias himself after he resigned the vice presidency to challenge Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the 2021 Madrid election she fought as Comunismo o libertad. Yolanda Díaz, daughter of a CCOO leader in Galicia, has since rebranded the space as Sumar, and the polls now put the two lists back where the PCE and Izquierda Unida have usually stood.

The episode ends in the present, with a camp in Sol and a CCOO and UGT general strike called weeks before the vote that, we argue, follow the 2011 playbook, and with a joint Senate list alongside the PSOE that echoes the Frente Popular ninety years on. Across that century the far left has had its moments of exuberance and has always returned to the same place, a marginal appendage of the PSOE. The title comes from Iglesias at Podemos’s founding assembly in October 2014, when he told supporters that heaven is taken by storm (el cielo se toma por asalto), a line borrowed from Marx’s letter on the Paris Commune. Next episode covers the separatist, nationalist and regionalist parties, from Catalonia and the Basque Country to the Canary Islands and Teruel Existe.

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Pedro Sánchez only got into Congress in 2009 and 2013 because colleagues ahead of him on the PSOE list resigned, and in 2011 he was placed too low on the list to win a seat at all. A year after he came back as a substitute he was secretary general of the party. In October 2016 the party’s federal committee resigned all together to force him out, which had never happened before. Eight months later he had won the leadership back, and by June 2018 he was prime minister. He got there through the first successful motion of censure in Spanish democracy, without a seat in parliament and leading a group of only 84 members of parliament. In this last episode of our three-part series on the Spanish Socialist Party, Diego and I trace that path from deep in the back benches to Moncloa. We ask what it tells us about the man, about the party, and about the institutions he now controls.

The timing matters. Sánchez has just called a snap general election for November, and the gap between how he is seen abroad and at home is wider than for almost any other European leader. As Tyler Cowen likes to say, context is that which is scarce. Foreign coverage sees a strong economy, a progressive leader, and a country still read with worn-out tropes through the Civil War. It rarely sees how Sánchez actually operates, and this episode tries to fill that gap.

Sánchez’s method starts with something he understood about Spanish parties. A leader who goes over the heads of the party machine can take everything with the votes of fewer than 200,000 members, who are far more radical than the people who run the party day to day. In fact, he did it twice. The first time was in 2014, with the backing of Susana Díaz’s Andalusian federation. The second was in 2017, when he toured the country in a Peugeot 407 with José Luis Ábalos, Santos Cerdán and Koldo García. Then he rewrote the party statutes so that no committee could ever remove him again. The same reasoning took him into government with partners he had sworn off. These were Podemos, who he once said would keep him from sleeping at night, Bildu, the political heirs of ETA, and the Catalan separatists whose leader he had promised to bring back to stand trial. In the end he gave them an amnesty.

We spend a good part of the episode on that amnesty and what it shows about the Spanish state. The law went to Congress as a proposición de ley (a bill introduced by parliamentary groups). That route skips the Consejo de Estado’s opinion and the impact assessments a government bill must carry. It passed with 177 votes after a Senate veto that can only delay a law. The Constitutional Court then upheld it six to four, and one of the six was Juan Carlos Campo, the former justice minister who had once said an amnesty would be unconstitutional.

In our view the word we most associate with the Spanish Socialists is power. Spaniards often derogatively call the party la PSOE, in the feminine, instead of the correct el PSOE. Why? Because of la Mafia. It is said that the 1980s Alfonso Guerra promised that after the Socialists had governed, Spain would become unrecognisable even to the mother who bore her. Whatever happens in November, Sánchez has made that promise truer than Guerra could have imagined.

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In this episode we continue our history of the PSOE, the party that has governed Spain longer than any other.

We open in Toulouse in 1974, where a party that has been in exile for almost forty years holds its thirteenth congress while Franco lies in a hospital bed. Two young Sevillians, Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra, take over an organisation funded by German social democrats and blessed in person by Mitterrand, Palme, Brandt and Michael Foot. Within five years González has stripped the word Marxism out of the party’s own doctrine, resigning the leadership to force the point and returning with almost ninety percent of the vote. In 1982 he wins 202 seats and the press calls it el rodillo, the steamroller.

Then the other half of the story. Miguel Boyer’s liberalising reforms give way to the GAL death squads, the Filesa financing conviction, the Roldán case, and a Mr X nobody ever identified. Aznar arrives in 1996, González leaves in 1997, and after a brief interregnum under Almunia and Borrell the party hands itself to an unknown professor from León.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero won an election nobody expected him to win, legislated same sex marriage and abortion, and rewrote how Spain is permitted to talk about its own civil war. The FAES think tank later counted eighty four separate occasions on which he denied there was an economic crisis, before unemployment reached twenty five percent and the constitution itself had to be amended. Our title comes from a hot mic on Cuatro in February 2008, when Zapatero told Iñaki Gabilondo that what suited them was for there to be tension.

We finish in 2014, with a complete unknown named Pedro Sánchez.

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Spanish Political Parties Series Part 4 of 8

Every origin story worth telling has its incongruities, and the Spanish Socialist Party offers a particularly rich one. The first episode of this 3-part episode opens with a Bizet aria, a wall of Goya’s blackest paintings arriving at the Prado, and a founding manifesto proclaiming the war between two unequal and antagonistic classes. From these three artifacts the conversation reconstructs how a party born among Madrid café printers in 1879, with the husband of Karl Marx’s daughter Laura sitting at the table, grew over the following century into the organization that would claim to embody modern Spain itself.

It is, Diego and Rasheed, insist, a story that cannot be told without the deep history surrounding it. So before the socialists do much of anything, we pass through the long and turbulent nineteenth century that produced them, the dynastic civil wars fought in the name of a pretender called Carlos, the glorious revolution that toppled Isabella II, the brief farce of an imported Italian king, and the conservative settlement that Antonio Cánovas del Castillo engineered to end the chaos. That settlement, the Restoration, ran on turnismo, a gentleman’s agreement by which liberals and conservatives simply traded power between themselves, and the hosts cannot resist noting how closely the complaint resembles the charge of bipartidismo leveled at the two large parties today.

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Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 3 of 8

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Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 2 of 8

The second half of our PP story opens on the worst morning in modern Spanish history. On 11 March 2004, three days before a general election the Popular Party expected to win comfortably, an Al-Qaeda cell detonated bombs on Madrid's commuter rail. Roughly 200 people died; it remains the deadliest terrorist attack the European Union has ever suffered, larger than Paris or London, and yet curiously less fixed in the international memory. We try to hold two things at once here: the human tragedy of 11M, mourned every year much as the United States mourns its own September date, and the political rupture that followed it. 

In 72 hours an electorate that was set to re-elect a government turned and removed it. How much of that swing was authentic moral revulsion at a governing party that had first blamed ETA, and how much was a coordinated campaign to pin the dead of Atocha on Aznar's alignment with Washington, is the question we sit with rather than resolve. What is not in dispute is that the left learned something that morning about the uses of the streets, and that the school of Zapatero was founded in those three days.

From there the episode becomes, in large part, an extended meditation on a single man and a single temperament. Mariano Rajoy governed the Spanish right for fourteen years, from the shock of 2004 to the no-confidence vote of 2018, and we make the case that his defining gift and his defining flaw were the same thing: a genius for staying still. He won the largest victory in the party's history in 2011, one hundred and eighty-six seats, and yet that triumph rested on a collapsed Socialist government and twenty-five per cent unemployment rather than on any positive enthusiasm for him. The "technocrat" label, which in English flatters and in Spanish insults, captures the puzzle. We trace the ideological inconsistencies that hollowed out the party's credibility: opposition to same-sex marriage later quietly abandoned, a Historical Memory Law denounced in opposition and never repealed in power, tax cuts promised and thirty tax rises delivered. Whatever one's own position on each issue, the pattern corrodes trust, and trust, once spent, does not return.

The Catalan crisis of 2017 is where we locate the real fracture. Faced with an illegal referendum staged with plastic ballot boxes, Rajoy reached for the judges and reached for Article 155 of the Constitution only after the fact, when the political moment had passed. It fell to King Felipe VI to give what was effectively a political speech, and to the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, not the prime minister, to headline the great unity rally in the streets of Barcelona. Separatism has fallen since, but the lesson voters drew about their own government's passivity proved expensive. We argue this is the moment the big tent that Fraga built and Aznar perfected began to come apart, scattering its classical-liberal and conservative occupants toward Ciudadanos and Vox.

The final part of the episode is a study in self-inflicted wounds. The Gürtel corruption affair was real but local, and the party's failure to defend the figures later acquitted of every charge. 

Then came Pablo Casado, young, articulate, genuinely a man of ideas, who destroyed himself in 2022 by moving against Isabel Díaz Ayuso over allegations we find, having seen the dossier, remarkably thin. Which leaves the strangest fact in Spanish politics today, and the one we keep circling: the most popular figure on the Spanish right does not lead it. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the overly-cautious Galician brought in as the adult in the room, has stabilised the party and brokered an uneasy coexistence with Vox, but excites no one. Ayuso, who may simply not want the job for reasons that are as much personal as strategic, remains the star. 

We close on the party's own 2025 self-description, "centro reformista," a phrase that means precisely nothing, and on the road to 2027, where the only thing certain is that voters will be excitedly embracing PP but unambiguously signaling no more Sánchez.

Next in the series: Vox.

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There is a tidy story we tell ourselves about who pays their debts. Rogue regimes and resource-rich autocracies default; mature European democracies, embedded in the rule of law and dependent on the confidence of the markets, do not. This episode is about what happens when that story breaks — when Spain, facing a wave of international arbitration awards arising from the retroactive cancellation of its clean-energy incentives, decides it would rather not pay, and finds itself the subject of frozen bank accounts and seized buildings across Europe.

Our guest, Ashley Messick, has spent fifteen years in the unusual profession that exists precisely for this moment. She is the person investors, law firms, and corporations call when a state goes rogue: when an arbitral award has been won and the debtor simply refuses to honor it. Her work sits at the intersection of law, private intelligence, and political risk — asset tracing, cross-border enforcement, and the patient, adversarial craft of forcing a sovereign to the negotiating table.

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Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 1 of 8

Why does Spain's Partido Popular speak so many different political dialects at once — Madrid's free-market libertarianism, Galicia's institutional conservatism, the Christian democracy of its old guard — and yet remain the largest political party in Europe? In this opening installment of a new series on Spanish democracy, Diego and Rasheed argue that the answer lies not in incoherence but in DNA: PP is, and has always been, a coalition wearing the clothes of a party.

The conversation moves from the death of Franco in 1975 through the engineered transition under King Juan Carlos, the founding of Alianza Popular by the formidable and unelectable Manuel Fraga, the collapse of the centrist UCD, the failed "Roca Operation" through which Catalan economic elites tried to manufacture an alternative center-right, and finally the 1989 Sevilla congress where Fraga surrendered the stage to a then-obscure regional president named José María Aznar. Along the way: why a brilliant Francoist minister who helped draft the 1978 Constitution could never win a national election; how Margaret Thatcher personally berated Fraga over Spain's vote on NATO; why the "Clan de Valladolid" outmaneuvered Fraga's preferred successor, the glamorous Isabel Tocino, in a weekend confrontation at his Galician fishing house; and the case for Aznar as perhaps the most consequential pro-liberty Western leader of the late twentieth century outside Reagan and Thatcher.

Threaded through the narrative is a quieter argument about democratic self-restraint — Franco's regime dissolving itself into a constitutional monarchy, Fraga stepping aside despite holding the party in his hand, Aznar imposing his own two-term limit at the peak of his power and keeping the promise — set against the unraveling of those unwritten rules in contemporary Spanish politics.

Part I closes on the eve of the 2004 election, with PP at its absolute majority and Mariano Rajoy chosen as Aznar's successor by a finger pointed across the cabinet table. Part II picks up with what happened three days before the vote.

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