It's A Trust Thing: Spain's political parties

It must come as a blow to Uncle Alfredo that he is not trusted by 91% of Spaniards. As leader of PSOE, Rubalcaba should be making some inroads into the void that is known as Rajoy. Yet even Mariano can count on seven per cent more Spaniards trusting him.

Rubalcaba's rating reinforces the feeling that PSOE made a mistake in not consigning their Solzhenitsyn doppelgänger to the Gulag of political wilderness after Mariano meandered all but unopposed to the finishing-line twelve months ago. When only nine per cent of the population trusts you, the chances of your ever gaining sufficient support to be gainfully employed as Spanish prime minister are remote in the extreme. Word has it that PSOE grandees are seeking an alternative, now finally convinced that Ruby, Ruby, Ruby will not be socking it to anyone, least of all the electorate. Rubalcaba can't even convince his own supporters; 80% of PSOE voters don't trust him.

The appalling and plunging polling of both Rajoy and Rubalcaba is matched only by the slump in support for their respective parties; the Partido Popular has lost 13 points and PSOE six since the election in November last year. Had the PP not experienced a decline in popularity, something would be very wrong, but its slump can be attributed only partly to its handling of the economy. The trust thing is just as important, and trust has all but evaporated in Rajoy, in Rubalcaba and in two-party politics.

Between elections is not the best time to draw firm conclusions, but the inability of either of the main parties to inspire confidence - at a time when Spain is crying out for someone, anyone to do so - is opening the door to other options. Gains by local parties in regional elections this year and the likelihood of Artur Mas's CiU winning the forthcoming Catalonia election place regionalism very much to the fore. Neither the PP nor PSOE, both committed to the "state", is proving capable of holding back the tide of regionalist sentiment.

There has been no test of this sentiment in Mallorca and there won't be one until 2015 (unless something odd happens), but with trust in the Balearics PP eroding and PSOE locally in total disarray, might there be an opportunity for a third party?

The only obvious gain in popularity since the regional elections in 2011 has been for the PSM, the Mallorcan socialists, a party with a firmly pro-nationalist (Mallorcan nationalist) agenda. Now, however, there is El Pi, "autonomist" by mission statement, so therefore regionalist if not nationalist. But how much trust could it call upon? A new name, but there is still the hangover from the corrupt ways of the Unió Mallorquina and even the archived case against Jaume Font from his days with the PP.

There is hope that the UPyD, a genuinely new party when it was formed five years ago, might come to greater prominence. Devoid of any of the baggage associated with other parties, representative of a different style of centrist politics, it would be refreshing to see it make headway. But how could it? Without selling its soul, it is unlikely to ever have a machine sufficiently well-oiled to make a significant impact. It also doesn't deal in the populist, and it is this - populism - that is the real fear that lurks behind the collapse of trust in the two main parties.

Such a populist voice or presence hasn't emerged, but this doesn't mean that it couldn't. The loss of trust in the political parties has very strong echoes of the past, the 1930s, and placed in combination with the international humiliation that Spain is most likely to face when (not if) it finally bows to the inevitable bailout, the savaging of economic crisis, the need to seek scapegoats and the threat to nationhood posed by Mas and possibly others, the lack of the trust thing creates a potentially volatile situation. And this volatility may draw energy from the force within a black-hole vacuum of leadership that requires filling.

The measures taken to tackle economic crisis are bound to provoke a fall in popularity, but the loss of trust stems only partially from a feeling that politicians (including Rubalcaba) are incapable of truly tackling the crisis. It comes also from a belief that this incapability is linked with vested interests that create constraints. It is an acknowledgement of the inherent corruption of the political system, one that could be overlooked when times were good but cannot be now that times are bad.


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