Fear And Loathing: The PP

Well, can you just put it all down to a natural cycle? The right wins at one election and at the next one it loses. We'll have to wait four years to know if this was some form of cyclical occurrence or something more permanent. What cards might get stacked up against the victors of 2015 come 2019? Might these cards consign them to electoral massacre?

Let's be in no doubt, the Partido Popular has suffered a massacre. For all the brave words about economic recovery, time had run out, as had patience: austerity, corruption and no small amount of mean-spiritedness all played a part. As had miscalculation. The PP is a party too consumed with the past and with a wish to make it the future. Abortion, Catholic conservatism, the "gagging" law: they all crept in to the mix and were rejected. They will also be rejected at the general election. Rajoy will gain the most votes but he will lose. Time for him has all but run out; the regions of Spain allied against him, he is a dead politician limping.

Rajoy will hope that there will be some screwball carryings-on that the PP can latch onto between now and the general election; it really is his only hope. But it is likely to be a forlorn one. Mallorca, the Balearics, Spain haven't so much lurched to the left as been shifted there by a colossal movement of political tectonic plates. Yet, this is not a left in a traditional sense. PSOE cannot look to the future with any great optimism and nor can it rejoice in its performance on 24 May. The Balearics was not untypical. PSOE loses seats but may still manage to head an administration. It will be a position of weakness not of strength. PSOE has to recognise, if it hadn't already, that the rules have changed. But the question it will ask itself is - does this represent only a temporary remoulding of left-leaning politics and indeed of Spain's politics overall? No one can properly or adequately answer this.

Rajoy might also draw some perverse comfort from Greece. As that country stumbles along, closing in on default, avoiding it, seeking another negotiation, he can raise the Syriza flag as a warning of what might be. But even this is too late, and he has contributed to this. He has made the economy too good. A coalition that will replace him may find room for Podemos, but only room. Austerity might be lifted but Podemos would only be one of the architects. The regional elections offer this proof. Podemos will not be a Syriza, and even were it to be, it no longer follows that Podemos would be reckless. It could not back track on anti-austerity, but its chameleon nature affords it an inherent restraint that once appeared not to be evident.

But any plan to demonise Podemos - demonise it further - could backfire. It would be the demonisation of newness, coming from a party with its roots in the past. The PP, Rajoy are left flailing around, unloved, as grey and uncharismatic as Rajoy himself is, screaming growth above all the shouts of corruption and the echoes of the past. People aren't listening. They have grown tired of the Rajoys. They gave them one more go, but by default rather than desire. They never loved the PP, even when they were sending them to the landslides in 2011.

Yes, it is the economy, stupid, and it was this which undid Zapatero and Antich in the Balearics, but screaming the economy goes only so far. The miscalculation, the mean-spiritedness were assaults on what PSOE had brought about in social and cultural terms. The people didn't want to lose these. They were willing to accept that an unpleasant dose to cure the economy was to come, but they were not willing to turn their backs on modernity or on cultural gains. Rajoy's miscalculation was also Bauzá's: he was simply wrong to have done what he did with Catalan. The divisions in society were predicted before he became president. They were right. And when Podemos and the progenitors of Guanyem in Barcelona ran with the baton of the indignados and 15-M and exposed the hideous realities of the sufferings of the evicted, comdemned for all time to a debt that they would never be able to pay off, the mean spirit of the reaction was greater than the small scraps of sympathy. Loathing. No party can survive that. Fear for and within the PP has taken over.

And loathing has put paid to Bauzá. Loathing from within his party and from without. He will go with his head held low, the leader who led his party to its worst-ever electoral performance, the consequence of several factors, one of which was him.