The Galician left has seen in the pellet crisis a window of opportunity in the face of elections that the PP considered won. The popular ones resist with a certain solvency in the polls (with the exception of the CIS) and await a calm campaign where nothing happens, while the left, divided into up to four options -PSdeG, Galician Nationalist Bloc, Sumar and Podemos-, longed for some mobilizing element to increase electoral tension and achieve a high participation that gives them some option next February 18.
Two weeks before the electoral campaign began, thousands of people – 7,500 according to the Government Delegation and 20,000 according to the organizers – took to the streets of Santiago de Compostela last weekend to denounce the management of the crisis by the different administrations. The left as a whole – although separately – supported the call “in defense of the future of the sea.”
The former spokesperson for Never Again, Uxía Senlle, was at the march and these days what happened more than 20 years ago with the Prestige crisis comes to mind. “We have not learned in terms of maritime safety, what happened with the pellets is discouraging and it gives the impression that the administrations have acted the same and have looked the other way instead of acting,” she says in a conversation with La Vanguardia.
Senlle admits that the images of these weeks of volunteers collecting these small plastic particles on the Galician coast are far from those harsh images of November 2002 of people clad in white overalls stacking chapapote after the Prestige tragedy. Despite this, left-wing parties have been quick to draw parallels between both disasters.
A comparison that the Galician PP disdains. Training sources highlight “the different nature of the spill” and emphasize that, while the Prestige carried 77,000 tons of fuel, the Toconao’s pellet container had 26 tons. “The dimensions of the situation are incomparable, but what is comparable is the opposition’s willingness to try to extract electoral benefits from an episode of marine pollution,” they criticize.
In this sense, the same sources highlight that “the powers to stop it, in one case or another, belong to the central government”; and they show their surprise that, in 2002, the central government was attacked for the spill and, now, the blame is directed at the Xunta. The reason: “Then the PP governed at the national level and now the PSOE governs.”
But what happened then? What repercussions did the Prestige environmental catastrophe have on the Galician political landscape? The analysis of the results of the elections that were held in the months after the spill shows that the stains that flooded the Costa de la Muerte barely had an immediate electoral reflection.
Months after the ecological disaster (November 2002), Galicia held municipal elections and the PP achieved incontestable absolute majorities in towns such as Muxía, Fisterra or Arteixo, three of the municipalities in the so-called zone zero of the spill. In Cee, where the PSdG had been the most voted force (34.47% of the ballots) in 1999, the PP took over the Mayor’s Office in the elections after the fuel spill with 45.39%.
There was also a turnaround in Cabana de Bergantiños, where the socialists lost the rod of command. In fact, of the municipalities of the Costa de la Muerte, only one changed from the PP to the hands of the left, Carballo became governed by a mayor from the Bloc, although the PP remained the party with the most votes in this municipality of more than 30,000 inhabitants.
The professor of Political Science and Administration at the University of Vigo, Enrique José Varela, explains that it was an “environmental crisis that quickly led to a social crisis due to the rapid response of citizens and city councils.” Faced with the slow reaction of the central and regional Administrations, he points out, there was a very rapid institutional response from the town councils and mayors who saw how their neighbors and the fishermen’s guilds demanded that they act upon the arrival of the chapapote to their coasts.
This explains, in part, that there was no catharsis in the vote: “The mayors who were in charge of the City Councils repeated, there was more identification with the mayor than with the brand.” The professor from the University of Vigo emphasizes that, in addition, since the 90s the Galician political system of three parties – PP, PSdG and Galician nationalism in its different forms – has proven to be “very stable” and the changes have been “very slow.”
Uxía Senlle, who lived through that crisis on the front lines of the citizen protest, adds that it was “very difficult to dismantle that boss network” that controlled the vote in the towns. The Galician singer and songwriter points out that a lot of aid was promised and that “a network was created to buy wills with economic promises” that neither the social movements nor the parties managed to dismantle.
Despite everything, it is true that, in these municipal elections, the popular party regressed and remained at 42.2% of the votes compared to the 46.1% they obtained four years earlier in the autonomous community as a whole. In A Coruña – the province most affected by chapapote – the PP achieved 37.45% compared to the 41.33% it achieved in the 1999 municipal elections.
In the coastal towns, the PP withstood the pull, while in the four provincial capitals the attrition was uneven in the local elections of 2003. In A Coruña, the PP kept the seven councilors; in Ourense the absolute majority; in Pontevedra it narrowly stopped being the most voted force; while in Lugo it suffered its greatest setback and went from 12 to 9 councilors.
It must be taken into account that the environmental mobilization was not the only ingredient that agitated and mobilized the left at that time. The famous Goya gala that coined the ‘No to War’ and stirred criticism against the PP government was held in February 2003, three months before the local elections.
However, both Senlle and Varela agree in pointing out that, although there was no “catharsis” – “in Galicia the changes are prolonged over time,” the professor reiterates -, “little by little the cards fell and the citizens asked responsibilities to the rulers at the polls,” adds the artist. Senlle admits that the change did not occur in the municipal elections, “but underground currents did begin to move that led to the electoral reversal in 2005.”
A year and a half after the spill (2004), Mariano Rajoy’s PP lost the general elections – of course, with a good performance by the popular Galicians who got close to 48% of the votes – and the conservative brand could not maintain, in the regional elections of the following year (2005) the absolute majority that it had held in the Xunta since 1989. Its candidate, Manuel Fraga, was no longer eternal and a pact between the PSdG and the Galician Nationalist Bloc led to a shift to the left. “Although it was a parenthesis, it was a historic change,” says Senlle.
Varela points out that, in addition to the Prestige crisis, there were other elements of wear and tear that prevented a new mandate for the PP, which, yes, took only one legislature to regain power and return stability to the Galician political system.
For this reason, the Political Science professor is reluctant to venture how the current, lesser environmental crisis will affect the next elections. “The opposition has taken advantage of the environmental crisis to launch the electoral campaign and has taken the rulers on their heels,” he admits. However, he is not clear that this is enough since, “although there is greater citizen awareness of the environment, surveys indicate that Galicians have other priorities that can sway the vote.”
All in all, the Galician political board is open because, as Varela indicates, before the campaigns barely moved between 3 and 4% of the voting percentage. However, currently, issues such as the pellet crisis as well as any other that the parties manage to include on the agenda in a positive way for their interests – for example, “they will be elections with a high national component” – can ” quickly activate participation in a “low profile” political system characterized by high abstention. And that activation could be decisive in the votes on February 18.
