Patricia Crespo |
Madrid (EFE) dissolution of the political center in our country.
“Politically yes,” says the president of the Center for Sociological Research, José Félix Tezanos, who points out that, curiously, Spain has been, since the Transition, a country that has a sector of the population, almost a third, that considers itself center, center left or center right.
The orphaned electorate
One of the peculiarities of the Spanish political system is, in his opinion, that the parties or leaders that have operated in the center have always had some inclination to the right, which has made them lose those voters. “There is an orphan electorate that can range from 10 to 20% that cannot find a party similar to the European center parties. So, in this sense, the center is diluted as a political expression, but not as a sociological base ”, he maintains.
“No”, Narciso Michavila, president of Gad3, one of the main Spanish consultancies dedicated to preparing electoral polls, answers the question emphatically. What is taking place, he argues, is an artificially manufactured polarization “from the elites”, which is taking place in practically all democracies and which has a lot to do with new technologies and with the fact that politicians understand less and less to society.
Return to imperfect bipartisanship
“The majority of the electorate in almost all the issues that we raise seek a compromise solution and are aware that in almost all issues radical solutions tend to be a threat”, he affirms, adding that the tendency is to return to the center, to bipartisanship.
Michavila assures that just as the financial crisis of 2008 heavily punished the traditional government parties and caused reversals in all democracies, this crisis resulting from the covid and the war in Ukraine is generating, as is being detected in all the elections , and more specifically in the regional ones in Spain, a reinforcement of government parties. “Therefore, we return to an imperfect bipartisanship.”
Antonio Asencio, Director of Communication and Strategy at Sigma Dos, the veteran survey and demoscopy company, asks to differentiate between the electoral center and the political center. “The majority of Spaniards are located in the center of the ideological scale following the shape of Gauss’s bell, that is to say, wider in the center and narrower at the ends and that has not changed substantially in recent years.”
A country of center
In the same way, he adds, the arithmetic mean of the affiliation of the ideological self-location of the Spaniards has not changed either, which “continues to be located in the center, slightly inclined towards the center left.”
This has not changed, Asencio points out, what happens is that this ideological distribution does not have to have a direct correlate in the offer of political parties, in such a way that people who locate themselves in the ideological center can vote depending on the situation politics to a party of the left or one of the right, if there is no one that they feel represents them better.
Do we live in a more polarized society? No, -he replies- Spanish voters have not been ideologically radicalized, what has happened is that parties have broken into the political scene that in the context of the current media debate are perceived as more extremist, but that does not mean that voters of those parties see those parties as so extremist or that they perceive themselves as so extremist.
Nor does Tezanos see polarization, for whom what is happening is that in the spaces furthest to the left, where around 6-7% of Spaniards came to be located, now more than 15% are located, an increase motivated by ideological radicalization of sectors of the population that suffer social problems, such as job insecurity.
On the opposite side, the space of the extreme right is growing more, “the late Francoists, who are thinking in coordinates of other types of political systems, not of democracy. Those grow to 5-6%.”
Michavila recalls, for his part, that what the extremes seek is to condition governments and what the majority parties seek is to govern. “To understand the electorate, apart from the left-right axis, which is a very big simplification, there is an axis that is fundamental, which is the one formed by traditional parties of majority governments and parties that go to extremes.” His strategies -he explains- have nothing to do with it.
The other empty Spain
Who does see a certain dissolution of the political center is the sociologist Miguel del Fresno, who calls this orphaned space “the other emptied Spain.”
“It is true that there are groups of the population that do not belong to either of the two great political poles, and that may be in favor of certain policies of each side. The problem with biconceptuals is that they are being compressed, they are shrinking, the trend towards social and political polarization is reducing the number of people who can be comfortable in ambiguous or ambivalent zones”, he comments.
What they all agree on is that in Spain the elections continue to be won in the center.
“This continues to be the case because, among other things, there is no party that capitalizes on all that centrist vote,” says Tezanos. “Victory is going to take shape in that portion of voters, necessarily, it is a mathematical question,” adds Asencio. In order to govern, concludes Michavila, the social majority is necessary, which is always in the center, and for this reason “the one who conquers the center is the one who conquers power.”