In the Whirlwind of the Economic Crisis: Local and Regional Elections in Spain, May 2011

Abstract

With an unemployment rate over 20 per cent and following the passage of an economic austerity plan and the Prime Minister's announcement that he would not be standing again, the local and regional elections of 22 May 2011 saw the incumbent Socialist Party obtain its worst results in the history of Spanish democracy and lose most of its municipal and regional power. In the Basque Country, Bildu, a coalition dominated by members of ETA's political wing, obtained very high popular support. We comment on the context, the campaign and the results of the elections and then discuss the extent to which the results are due to the economic crisis.

Keywords:

• Elections
• Spain
• PSOE
• PP
• Economic Crisis

Notes

[1] For a more detailed analysis of protest voting in the 22 May elections, see Jiménez (2011).

[2] However, as one reviewer pointed out, the blank vote was already quite high in the Catalan elections of 2010 (2.9 per cent), long before the indignados started their protests. This casts some doubt on the specific impact of the movement in the elections.

[3] For a more nuanced analysis, see Jiménez (2011). He finds some partial evidence that in those cities where protests were larger, protest voting was greater and the proportion of vote share going to the two big parties lower.

[4] The questions were the same; the answer option varied. We have homogeneised the variables to make them comparable: see the methodological note in Table 4.

[5] CIS, Survey no. 2,847 (N = 2,475), October 2010.