Spain woke up on Monday to confirmation that its relatively stable two-party system of the past thirty-five years had been fundamentally transformed. In last year’s European elections, the center-left Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and the center-right People’s Party (PP) saw their joint vote share reduced from close to 80 percent to just about 50 percent. This Sunday’s elections for all of Spain’s municipalities and thirteen of its seventeen regional governments produced a similar shift: a devastating loss for the governing PP (down from 37 percent to 27 percent) combined with big gains for the hard left of Podemos and the good-governance centrists of Ciudadanos.
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