Thread by @takisspappas

What one needs to know for understanding Vox and the Spanish elections result.
A longish thread.
#Spain, #spainelections, #vox_es

From Franco's death until 1982, Spanish conservatism was represented by the Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD), an offshoot of modern Francoism, which managed to steer Spain firmly in a democratic direction.

Part of the UCD's success during re-democratization was the fact that Spanish political conservatism did not risk being outflanked on the right by electorally significant anti-system parties like the Italian MSI or the Greek Ethniki Parataxis.

Spain's Fuerza Nueva succeeded in electing only one deputy to the Spanish parliament (in 1979) before it disappeared altogether. Most of Spain's conservatives, therefore, found a political roof under the UCD.

The UCD, however, rapidly disintegrated as a result of incessant squabbling among its leaders and was abruptly displaced by a party on the far right of the political spectrum, the Alianza Popular (AP).

The AP was founded in October 1976 by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, heading a coalition of former Francoist ministers organically linked to Franco's dictatorship.

At least before the elections of 1982 in Spain, most Spaniards considered the AP to be a mere continuation of Francoism and questioned its democratic credentials. During that time, AP pursued a strategy of creating a *gran derecha* by the merging of small conservative groupings.

In the 1982 elections (triumphantly won by the socialist PSOE), the UCD barely managed to poll 7 percent of the national vote, which allowed the AP to emerge as the second largest party in the Spanish party system, which had now become essentially bipolar.

With the disappearance of UCD in 1983, and lacking serious opposition on the right-of-center, the AP, renamed Partido Popular (PP), in 1989 moved successfully into the vacuum left by UCD and made the necessary ideological adjustments to appeal to moderate voters.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, the years of PSOE dominance, the AP made several efforts to rebrand itself as a moderate centrist liberal party. Firstly, in 1988 it was renamed from AP into Partido Popular (PP).

Second, the older generation of party leaders were completely replaced in what was nothing less than a dramatic demographic turnover. The most prominent symbol of this change was José María Aznar, who in 1990 became PP leader at the age of 35.

Third, the PP adopted a moderate political discourse and took ideological and policy stands designed to dissociate itself from Francoism and becomemore attractive to the larger pool of centrist voters.

Largely thanks to all those changes, the PP succeeded in 1996 to topple the PSOE from power, ending thirteen years of uninterrupted socialist rule.

Since then, the PP ruled Spain during 1996-2004 and 2011-2018. Although it presented itself as a moderate liberal party, it always contained ultra-conservative, and even authoritarian factions within it.

Today's VOX is just a political coalition of such factions that abandoned PP to create a more ideologically coherent party. This also explains PP's current implosion.

Btw, you can read a full chapter on Spain and its lack until 2014 of populism in my recent book amazon.fr/Populism-Liber…