Lose Catalonia to gain Spain. That could be the motto of the Spanish right. But… What if the alternative route also worked? That is to say: if winning in Catalonia served precisely to govern Spain…
Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE has demonstrated once again that only a very clear victory of the left in Catalonia can prevent the right from governing in Spain. And the same thing already happened with Rodríguez Zapatero in 2008, although then with a socialist victory in the country as a whole. However, since that year, the PSOE has suffered an immense loss of votes, from which it has only partially recovered and in which, in one sense or another, Catalonia has played a determining role. It is also true, of course, that the 2008 elections were the swan song of the two-party system, since political fragmentation began for the PSOE in 2011.
Specifically, the socialists lost between 2008 and 2011 more than a third of their electoral harvest throughout Spain and almost half of the vote in Catalonia. And between 2011 and 2015 they once again lost one in every five votes in Spain as a whole. In total, socialism’s losses amounted to almost six million ballots in just two terms. But be careful, the new catastrophe of 2015 was accentuated by another aggravated collapse in Catalonia, where the PSC lost more than 330,000 votes; that is, 36% of the votes obtained in 2011 (an electoral event in which, furthermore, socialism had already ceased to be the leading Catalan force).
The socialist resurrection in the April 2019 elections was accompanied by a spectacular recovery in Catalonia, although still insufficient to be decisive in Spain as a whole. It is true that on April 28, 2019, the PSC added 400,000 more ballots than in the 2016 elections (which represented an increase of 72% compared to the votes of that year) while the PSOE grew less than 35% in the rest of Spain. However, in April 2019, Catalan socialism was still far from its Spanish counterpart in percentage of the vote: Sánchez touched 29% of the ballots in Spain as a whole but the PSC garnered only 23% and was still not the strongest force. voted in Catalonia.
Now, until then, and although Pedro Sánchez had entered the Government in 2018 with the support of peripheral nationalists in the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy, the socialist leader had not yet deployed his Catalan agenda of territorial and identity detente. The most audacious policy of defusing the Catalan conflict was launched after the repeat elections, in November 2019.
Consequently, the electoral balance of the Catalan opening of the PSOE must be made based on the results of the last four years. And apparently, the territorial balance is catastrophic. Except for the victory in Catalonia in the regional elections of 2021 and in the local elections of May 2023, the rest has consisted of an accumulation of defeats that culminated last March 28 with the loss of a good part of the local and regional power, except for Castilla. La Mancha, Asturias and Navarra. However, the general elections of last June 23 seemed to correct this drift, although thanks, above all, to the Catalan results, which this time were absolutely decisive.
The question is whether these Catalan results were “too” decisive and whether they occurred at the cost of a setback in the rest of Spain that, in the medium term, could drag the PSOE into irreversible decline. The numbers are eloquent: the PSC grew in Catalonia by a quarter of a million votes (and obtained more than 34% of the ballots), but the PSOE gathered practically the same votes in the rest of Spain as in April 2019 (a quote of participation more comparable to 23-J than the apathetic November electoral repetition four years ago).
In short, last July the PSOE obtained 250,000 more votes in Spain as a whole than in April 2019, but that growth was limited to Catalonia; In the rest of the State the count of socialist voters barely moved. And that means that the weight of Catalonia in the PSOE’s electoral harvest has increased to account for more than 15% of the total count of the socialist vote. However, there is nothing alarming about this: in the 2008 elections, the PSC also obtained a greater electoral share than the PSOE in Spain as a whole and Catalonia’s contribution accounted for 15% of the total votes (compared to 10% for the worst socialist records, in 2015 or 2016).
Likewise, this correlation is in line with the census weight of Catalonia in Spain, since Catalan voters make up almost 15.5% of the Spanish electorate. The data that shadows the future of the PSOE is located in some key territories, such as Andalusia (where socialism lost more than 100,000 votes from its April 2019 harvest on 23-J). In the rest, the losses were smaller: 49,000 ballots in Galicia (where the PP candidate was playing at home), and less than 40,000 in Madrid or 21,000 in Aragón, compared to increases of almost 100,000 votes in Valencia or 45,000 in the Canary Islands.
The problem with these figures is that they are misleading in the context of the overall left-wing vote. Even where the PSOE achieved substantial increases compared to the result of April 2019, the total balance of the left and center-left bloc continued to be negative due to the significant losses accumulated by the Sumar/Unidas Podemos space: more than 900,000 voters between 2019 and 2023. Conclusion: territorial opening rewards the left in Catalonia, but penalizes it in the rest of Spain. The right, on the other hand, remains impassive above the 11 million voters. The future will tell.
