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regional elections taking place in March 1980.Although the Socialists had won
the mayoral election of 1978, it was the conservative
Jordi Pujol i Soley
and
his coalition party
Convergència i Unió
(CiU) who gained regional power
– and who proceeded to dominate the Catalan parliament for the next quarter
of a century. In a way, the pro-conservative vote made it easy for the central
government to deal with Catalunya, since the demands for autonomy here did
not have the extreme political dimension they had in the Basque Country.
After the failure of an attempted
military coup
in February 1981, led by
Civil Guard ColonelTejero, the
elections of 1982
saw Felipe González’s PSOE
elected with a massive swing to the Left in a country that had been firmly in
the hands of the Right for forty-three years.The
1986 general election
gave
González a renewed mandate, during which time Spain entered the
European
Community
, decided by referendum to stay in NATO, and boasted one of
the fastest-growing economies in Western Europe. However, high unemploy-
ment, wage controls and a lack of social-security measures led to diminishing
support and the PSOE began losing much of its credibility. Narrow victories in
two more elections kept the Socialists in power, but after the 1993 results were
counted it was clear that they had failed to win an overall majority and were
forced to rely on the support of the Catalan nationalist coalition, CiU, to retain
power.This state of affairs well suited Jordi Pujol, who was now in a position to
pursue some of the Catalan nationalists’ more long-cherished aims, in particular
the right to retain part of the region’s own income-tax revenue.
Contemporary politics
Following allegations of sleaze and the disclosure of the existence of a secret
“dirty war” against the Basque terrorists, the calling of a
general election
in 1996
came as no surprise and neither did the overall result. In power for
almost fourteen years, the PSOE finally succumbed to the greater appeal of
the conservative Partido Popular (PP), under
José Maria Aznar
– the first
conservative government in Spain since the return of democracy. However, the
PP came in well short of an outright majority, and Aznar was left with the same
problem as González before him – relying on the Catalan nationalists and other
smaller regionalist parties to maintain his party in power.
In the
general election of 2000
, the PP won a resounding victory in the
national parliament, whilst Catalunya was left under CiU control. For the first
time, the PP was no longer dependent on other parties to pass legislation and
was high on confidence, though within two years Aznar’s government had begun
to lose its way. In particular,Aznar’s fervent support of US and British
military
action in Iraq
in 2003 led to huge discontent. Polls showed that ninety percent
of Spaniards opposed the conflict – manifested in Barcelona by a cacophonous
nightly anti-war banging of pots and pans from the city’s balconies.
However, in the local elections of 2003, Aznar and the PP defied the polls,
holding off the PSOE in many major cities (Barcelona excepted). With the
PSOE beset by corruption scandals and affected by the strong separatist show-
ing in regional elections, it seemed that the best the PSOE could hope for was
to deny the PP an absolute majority in the
2004 general election
.That was
before the dramatic events of March 11, 2004, when terrorists struck at the
heart of
Madrid
, killing 200 people in coordinated train bombings. Spain went
to the polls in shock a few days later, and voted in the PSOE against all expecta-
tions.With millions on the streets in the days after the attacks, it seemed the PP
had been punished both for supporting the war in Iraq, and – prematurely to
many – for blaming the bombings on the Basque separatists, ETA.
CONTEXTS
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A history of Barcelona and Catalunya