Europe | Spain’s elections

Clean hands

The economy is recovering nicely. Cronyism, alas, is rife

Dec 16th 2015|MADRID

IN MAY 2014 Isabel Carrasco was murdered as she walked across a footbridge over the Bernesga river in the north-western Spanish city of León. Ms Carrasco, a controversial local bigwig in the People’s Party (PP) of the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, was shot at point-blank range by the mother of a young woman whom she had excluded from her political patronage network. (The young woman, the daughter of a local police chief, had been refused a government job.) It was an act of madness, but within the local political context it made a crazy kind of sense. “This was about cronyism, about her daughter’s career,” said Juan Carlos Fernández, a local spokesman for Ciudadanos, a political party that campaigns against corruption.

As Spain prepares for national elections on December 20th, cronyism is near the top of voters’ concerns. Both the PP and the opposition Socialists, who have taken turns in government for the past 33 years, are viewed by voters as deeply corrupt. The Socialists once hoped that anger at Mr Rajoy’s austerity programme would bring them back to power. But an economic recovery may allow the PP to hold on.

Many Spaniards have embraced two upstart parties that vow to drive cronyism from public life. The anti-austerity Podemos party, led by Pablo Iglesias, a left-wing political-science professor, once seemed ready to sweep to power. But over the past year it has been surpassed by Ciudadanos, a liberal party led by a 36-year-old lawyer, Albert Rivera (pictured). Although voters worry most about the economy, “those going to the new parties are almost as concerned about corruption,” says Pablo Simón, editor of Politikon, a politics blog. Together, the newcomers look set to win nearly 40% of the vote and deny both the PP and the Socialists a majority.

Ms Carrasco’s power base was a part of León’s government called the Diputación (housed in a 16th-century palace), an intermediate layer in some Spanish provinces that distributes public works and largesse to small municipalities. She gained a reputation for iron-fisted favouritism; her successor, another PP appointee, was arrested (and later released on bail) in an investigation into corruption. Both Ciudadanos and Podemos want to scrap the Diputación layer of government entirely. Ciudadanos also wants to merge many of Spain’s 8,117 municipal councils, some of which represent just a few hundred villagers.

Such measures are popular in urban areas that are too big to receive Diputación money. But they are unpopular in León and other rural provinces. “You don’t win the rural vote by telling people you will take away their local councils,” says Ms Carrasco’s successor as PP provincial boss, Eduardo Fernández. Besides, scrapping layers of government is difficult: civil servants have cast-iron job guarantees. And Spain’s electoral system gives disproportionate weight to sparsely populated rural provinces. The state pollster, CIS, shows the PP winning 29% of the overall vote, but its strength in the countryside could give it up to 128 of the 350 seats in parliament.

A PP victory, however marginal, would be Mr Rajoy’s prize for turning around the economy. It shrank by 4% in 2010-13, but has grown 3% this year. Unemployment is falling but still high, at 21%. Most new jobs are short-term and unstable. Labour reforms pushed through by the PP in 2012 have helped Spain devalue by means of wage reductions, but this has reached its limits, says Alfredo Pastor of the IESE business school. Ciudadanos’s solution is to free up the labour market with a single, catch-all employment contract, to get rid of Spain’s sharp insider-outsider divide between protected permanent workers and those on precarious short-term contracts. Podemos and the Socialists propose to repeal the PP’s partial liberalisation.

Catalonia’s desire for independence is a wild card. Neither the PP nor Ciudadanos has anything special to offer secessionist Catalans, which explains why Podemos, which supports an independence referendum, may win first place there. Mr Rivera is himself a Catalan; indeed, Ciudadanos began life as an anti-nationalist group in the region. Although he opposes independence, he may be better placed to understand local sensitivities than Mr Rajoy, who has seen a leap in support for secession on his watch.

The new parties’ strength shows how profoundly Spaniards want their system to change. It probably will. It is almost certain that no one party will gain an outright majority. Coalition government would require new skills of compromise and horse-trading from Spanish parties, which are used to governing alone. Yet the old politics has some life in it yet. Just 11 weeks before the election, the government shored up its support in León with a new high-speed rail link to Madrid, reminiscent of the dubious infrastructure projects that got Spain into trouble during the go-go years. Mr Rajoy himself cut the tape.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Clean hands"