LONDON: On Nov 20, 2011, Spain’s Popular party (PP) won the general election with the most absolute majority ever won by the Spanish right in democratic times. The left collapsed. The Socialist party (PSOE) lost a third of its seats and 38 per cent of its voters in its worst result since 1933. Of the 4 million voters to abandon the Socialists, only 600,000 did so for the United Left (IU) — a coalition led by the Communist party.

It is, without doubt, payback for the economic crisis; part of the same wave that has swept the majority of leftwing governments from power in Europe. Has the crisis caused Spanish society to shift to the right, or is it that the left has been stranded without discourse and without ideas? In truth, the answer is more complicated than these two oft-repeated clichés.

The election results reveal that the conservative absolute majority is not built on the unstoppable rise of the right. Mariano Rajoy, the new prime minister, won 10.8m votes in the November election, only 500,000 more than in 2008, when he lost to Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Opinion polls do not show an ideological shift to the right either. According to the Centre for Sociological Investigations, the majority of Spaniards describe themselves as centre-left, ahead of right or centre-right.

Rajoy’s landslide at the polls was down to the abstention and break-up of the left, not the growth of his social base.

So what caused the electoral collapse of the Spanish left? It’s a problem of supply, not of demand: in government the left was incapable of living up to the ideas and discourse of its voters. During the years of the property bubble, the PSOE embraced liberal economic policies, especially in terms of taxation. “Lowering taxes is of the left,” Zapatero frivolously declared as he introduced numerous tax cuts that greatly benefited the upper classes. Then came the recession, and Zapatero was slow to react, lost in an absurd semantic debate about the word “crisis”.

By arrangement with the Guardian