Electoral behaviour in Spain: an analysis (II)

In the first part of this two pieces analysis on electoral behaviour, I asked what is the Right's strategy to counteract the natural left-wing majority in Spain. That is the analysis I try to present here extracted from a piece by Basilio Baltasar in El Pais newspaper.

Baltasar argues that the Right in Spain isn't concerned anymore with the formal political process but rather to wave the flag of a new anti-politics populism that undermines the prestige of public institutions.

He argues that PP is encouraging a movement based on the questioning of the judicial power and the encouragement of popular suspicion not based in the idea of reasonable doubt but rather in information manipulation and the politicisation of naturally independent institutions. The continous request for further evidence in the Madrid bombings case, although a court rule has been completed, is a great example of this strategy by PP. This way PP installs a natural suspicion in the population that starts questioning the most basic democratic institutions in the State and polluting the normal development of the rule of law.

Furthermore, Baltasar argues, the Right has taken on this strategy because they realise the State, which once they use to control, is escaping them. The State today oversees their business activity, questions religious values being mixed with its rule and promotes further social rights for the lower classes. It is reason that governs today through the rule of law and a State founded in the principles inherited from European Enlightment, and therefore takes away from the Right their ability to control and manipulate as it pleases.

PP and its allies don't want to have to go through State oversights to achieve their goals, they don't want to have checks and balances because that limits their actions and they remember days when that wasn't necessary.

This is the strategy of the Right today to protect itself from a PSOE Government in 2008. Their aim is to create a wave of popular political apathy and to question the legitimacy of state institutions so in the chaos they can continue working without oversight. That is what PP's strategy has been for the last four years. The only hope for many is a new leadership, a more liberal and democratically-inspired leadership. A leadership that gets PP back into the democratic process and stops this movement that so much damage has already inflicted to the Constitutional consensus that all political forces achieved in 1978 and has taken Spain to where it is today.