Sometimes history repeats itself, but it doesn't always do it as a farce. Three years ago, the Spaniards finished off the holidays with an eye on the beginning of the course in September without knowing if there would be a government: the poor result of President Rajoy did not allow an investiture if the abstention of the socialist group did not occur. Things have not changed enough so that we do not know if the result is going to be similar this fall, although exchanging the actors: now it is President Sánchez who seems to need the abstention of his rivals in order to be invested president. In this context, it is interesting to propose some lines of analysis that allow us to unravel the panorama that is coming to us in the coming weeks.

It should be noted, in the first place, that in Spain there has been no culture of coalition government so far , although it is true that we are learning it by forced marches. After several decades in which these coalitions were scarce, they now prevail in the Autonomous Communities and knock on the doors of the Palace of La Moncloa. The problem is that coalitions that do not pivot over the center are always problematic coalitions. When the minority party is at the extreme and, therefore, is ideologically over-legitimized , the majority party rules with its eyes fixed on the rearview mirror, watching over its purest cabinet companions, those who do not stain themselves with the wicked composers to which bourgeois democracy impels us on a day-to-day basis and which, deep down, have not been corrupted by a plate of lentils.

The fear of these siren songs occurs with greater force in the parties that are located from the center to the left or in the nationalist sphere, since Spanish public life has been impregnated, for decades, with a common sense oriented towards the left that has generated a cultural hegemony against which the rest of the ideologies have not been able to raise a victorious challenge. Forty years do not seem to have been enough to legitimize completely in the public space on the right as a political actor in the eyes of many Spaniards, perhaps because of the bad conscience that Spanish society drags in relation to the duration and end of the Franco dictatorship . Therefore, the reluctance of the Socialist Party to enter into a coalition with United We can be understood, a formation with which it cannot compete in leftist purity before a large part of its electorate and with which it has never had a fluid relationship, in line with the bad relations that, historically, the Spanish social democracy has had with the forces located on its left ("Where can we, nor you, with the communists go?" Manuel Azaña asked Indalecio Prieto at the end of 1935 , when the Popular Front began to be drawn on the horizon). It is a more relevant handicap than it seems: in the era of info-entertainment, carrying out state policies, of those that often do not like and that are not easy to explain to voters, it is not easy with your partner and rival tweeting his position from the same table of the Council of Ministers.

Another more relevant element of what it seems is the appearance in Congress, for the first time, of a mountain regional deputy whose leader has no empathy in proclaiming on television sets that his vote costs money in terms of investments for the constituency. It is not a new situation, and there are the seats among others of the PNV or Canary Coalition to remind us, but the metastasis of the phenomenon is not good news for Spanish democracy. Assuming the legitimacy of their proposals and their right to defend them, we must remind politicians that the Congress articulates national sovereignty, and the deputies for Cantabria represent both the voters of Castro Urdiales and those of the Puebla de Sanabria, without going any further. If the message "let's vote for the party here to go to Madrid to get a slice" in the rest of the CCAA , the incentive that citizens will have to vote for parties that look beyond their village will be every smaller and the structure of our political system will suffer for it. Maybe then we have just understood how important our country parties are at the national level.

Another question that will be cleared in the coming months is to know how long a situation like the current one will remain, with five national-level parties above 10% of the votes in the general elections. In Spain, much more than the electoral law, it is the size of the constituency that determines the electoral results; removing the just sixteen provinces that elect seven or more deputies, in the rest the proportionality is scarce, so that parties that fall below 15% have difficulty obtaining representation in them. In these circumstances, it is very complicated that five parties coexist with a presence throughout the national territory , so everything seems to indicate that the system will be readjusted and the voters will end up betting in the medium term back to an imperfect bipartisan model. Some of that adjustment seems to be taking place on the left, where the good results of the Socialist Party in the double electoral meeting last spring are not explained without the debacle suffered by the formation of Pablo Iglesias .

Anyway, the fact of not having a stable government is not good news for anyone. Globalization continues to advance and a large part of the problems we face as a society cannot be managed without a government that sets priorities, manages alliances with other actors and allocates resources to achieve the proposed goals. This situation of interinity, common on the other hand in parliamentary-based systems, means going out to compete in a global world with a backpack loaded with stones , a world in which many of our competing countries go, as Machado wanted For men of the sea, light luggage.

Manuel Mostaza Barrios is a political scientist and director of Public Affairs of Atrevia.

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