After a tumultuous year, Spanish politics returns to an uneasy status quo
It’s been exactly a year ago since Spain held what would turn out to be the first of two general elections in ten months. The first vote unleashed chaos: new parties Podemos (‘We Can’, on the radical left) and Ciudadanos (‘Citizens’, on the centre-right) split 35 per cent of the vote between them. This ended the joint hegemony of Spain’s two oldest parties, meaning it was time to say goodbye to a status quo established when Franco’s death inaugurated democracy in 1975 – a world in which the Conservatives and the Socialists simply swapped power back and forth. Everything had changed. Or had it? After almost a year of antagonistic negotiations, the country’s new
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