Un ataque de optimismo.

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Financial Times, 2 / 3 junio 2015. Spain’s fracturing politics may help cleanse its institutions.

Con matices, Financial Times retoma las tesis de Víctor Lapuente Giné y Pablo Simón, que pudieran resumirse de este modo:

-La fragmentación política puede “favorecer las reformas”, “recortar la corrupción” y “mejorar la calidad de la gestión de Estado”.

-La fragmentación política puede “favorecer el control parlamentario”, obligando a unos y otros “a un mutuo control”.

En términos absolutos, estaría dispuesto a compartir esos puntos de vista. En términos concretos, me asaltan algunas dudas:

-Me cuesta imaginar cómo pudieran abordarse las dos grandes reformas pendientes, de la Constitución (evocada incluso por Rajoy) y la financiación del Estado autonómico, prevista incluso oficialmente, pero siempre aplazada.

-Un poco de “fragmentación” y gobierno en minoría quizá sea muy útil, sin duda. 13, 14 o 15 gobiernos autonómicos en minoría, un número considerable de grandes municipios gobernados por cambiantes (¿?) coaliciones, no invitan a un optimismo frenético.

-El caso de Andalucía -sin gobierno, desde hace semanas- confirma el riesgo de interminables negociaciones a varias bandas, en detrimento de la eficacia gestora.

-¿Son Madrid y Barcelona modelos / alternativas para el Estado?

Constitución, financiación del Estado, modelo político: diez años de reformas pendientes.

Crece la desintegración social de los españoles.
Ada Colau abre los campos de minas municipales, autonómicas y estatales.
España, puzzle inestable.

España, del duelo a garrotazos a la fragmentación inmovilista.

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Financial Times, 2 / 3 mayo 2015

Spain’s fracturing politics may help cleanse its institutions

Tobias Buck in Madrid

There is much hand-wringing about political fragmentation in Spain these days and it is not hard to see why.

Angered by corruption and the handling of the recent economic crisis, voters have fled Spain’s established parties in droves. At the last general election, the centre-right Popular party and the centre-left Socialists accounted for more than 70 per cent of all votes. When the country returns to the polls later this year, that share is expected to be closer to 40 per cent.

Last month’s cluster of regional and local elections gave a taste of things to come. The mainstream parties saw their share of the vote plunge to record lows, as millions of voters shifted their allegiance to two political upstarts: Podemos on the far left and Ciudadanos in the ideological centre. Not one of the 13 regional contests delivered an outright majority. Ten days after the voting closed, coalition talks have barely advanced. In most regions, voters have at best a vague idea which combination of parties will end up in power.

On the face of it, the fragmentation of Spanish politics raises alarming questions. What if there is no clear majority at the national level either? What if Spain has to be ruled by a minority government, forever threatened by collapse? And what if endless coalition talks leave the country leaderless while the embers of the eurozone crisis erupt into an economic fireball once again?

These are not trivial concerns. Yet, amid the gloomy speculation, there are signs of a pushback. In a recent opinion piece for the El País daily (headlined “A tribute to political fragmentation”), Victor Lapuente argued that the weakening of Spain’s two-party system was in fact a “blessing” for the country. An expert on governance at the University of Gothenborg, Mr Lapuente wrote: “Multi-party governments not only do more good things, they also do fewer bad things . . . Governments that need the support of other parties are less corrupt than governments with an absolute majority.”

Take the state of Spain’s widely-discredited public institutions. For much of the country’s recent history, every incoming government has been able to effortlessly stamp its authority on key branches of the state — from the central bank to the judiciary, and from regulators to the public television channel.

Equipped with absolute or near-absolute majorities, Spain’s established parties found it easy to rearrange swaths of the public realm whenever an election went their way. Many of the country’s bureaucrats, regulators, judges, prosecutors and public broadcasters have done and still do admirable work. Yet there have also been countless examples where the institutions they serve failed to show the required distance from the government of the day — whether on the left or on the right, in the regions or at the national level.
Or take the situation in parliament, where the ruling party is usually able to ram through legislation, often by fast-track decree, while blocking all attempts to form committees of investigation. To this day, despite the string of corruption scandals shaking Spanish politics, there has been no parliamentary panel of inquiry in the Madrid Congress to examine the causes and consequences of political corruption.

“When the political scene becomes more fragmented, parliaments grow stronger and political control over the government grows stronger,” says Pablo Simon, a politics professor at Madrid’s Carlos III University. “Those in power have to be more careful.”

Many Spanish leaders appear to view political fragmentation as an unintended consequence of voter frustration. They can understand that the electorate is angry — but assume that there is no desire to see Spain slide towards “ungovernability”. It is an insight that has given rise to a peculiar new pitch: vote for us — for the sake of political stability.

This argument may start to resonate, especially if the regions are left rudderless for months on end. But it seems more likely that Spanish voters know perfectly well what they are doing. Indeed, recent opinion polls show no sign that the electorate fears fragmentation or political instability. Voters know that their decisions will give rise to fragmented parliaments, coalition governments and a system where power is far more dispersed than it is now. And that may be just the way they like it.