Spanish Politics Today (review)

John Gibbons: Spanish Politics Today. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999. 174 pages. ISBN 0-7190-4945-8. £40.

The accomplishments of Spain since the death of Franco (1975) are remarkable by anyone's standards. The country of Lorca, Picasso, and Buñuel has experienced a veritable metamorphosis and has been the envy of many Eastern European states who have struggled, not often successfully, to achieve an acceptable balance between centralism and ethnic-driven federalism.

The Spanish transition from a centralized authoritarianism to a largely federal constitutional monarchy is one of the great success stories of European politics during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Few would have predicted that the pariah nation of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which had been excluded from Marshall Plan aid and from membership in the United Nations, would twice achieve the European Community presidency (in 1989 and 1996) or that the 1992 Olympic Games would have been showcased in an ultramodern Barcelona, proud capital of a resurgent Catalonia. Nor would many have predicted in 1969, when Franco presented Juan Carlos to the Cortes as his designated successor, that the young Bourbon heir would subsequently be "often cited as a role model for other royal families who wish to balance the idea and rituals of a traditional monarchy with the needs of the modern state." Even more unlikely was the possibility that Spain's public prosecutor--Baltazar Garzón--already a prominent crusader against political corruption, would underscore Spain's credentials in international law by requesting the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in London in October 1998 for crimes committed by the former Chilean dictator against humanity.

John Gibbons's Spanish Politics Today goes a long way toward explaining how these improbable occurrences came about, while examining the structure of politics in the mid to late 1990s, coinciding with post-Felipe González Spain. Gibbons focuses on the transition to democracy since the end of Francoism, concluding very aptly that "Spain's democracy is still evolving and that the development of the party system remains closely linked to that evolutionary process." What has changed is the framework or the parameters of the political scene. The political debate in today's Spain is not a constitutional one, as it was during the immediate aftermath of the Caudillo's death in 1975, nor does it hinge on the question of Spain's participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the EC. These struggles were decided by González's socialist government--in the first instance, in October 1978, with the ratification of Spain's current constitution and, in the second, with Spanish entry into NATO and the EC in 1989 and 1986, respectively. What has supplanted the concerns of the immediate post-Franco period is the debate on how to govern a Spain that has evolved from a fourteen-year, single-party monopoly under the PSOE (Socialist Workers Party of Spain) to "a growing two-party system at national level, supplemented by a mild level of regional multi- partyism."

The turning point in present-day Spanish politics came as the result of the general election of May 1996, when the PP (People's Party), led by José María Aznar, won the largest number of seats in the Cortes, though not an overall majority. The key to the "new" Spanish politics was not the number of seats won by the PP but the fact that, like the PSOE since 1993, it too "was obliged by electoral mathematics to enter negotiations on the formation of a government with the Catalan party, CiU [Convergence and Union], and others." Although it was clearly apparent that Spanish politics had become a veritable seesaw between the PSOE and the PP, it was also manifest that neither major political party could rule without forming a coalition with several minor parties, including the king-making CiU of Catalonia. Gibbons views this electoral necessity as providing "the PP prime minister, Aznar, with some beneficial side effects. It has reinforced his need...