The Least Imperfect System

The pollsters are at it again. No sooner have the elections been dispensed with than they are out with their clipboards or making their phone calls. The latest survey is still a test of electorate opinion: one to test voter satisfaction (or not) with the results of municipal elections. The Metroscopia survey has discovered that 57% of voters are not satisfied with the choices of mayors that have been made, the result in many cases of pacts of parties, none of which obtained majorities or even the most votes.

When you get into the detail of the poll, however, you find that the satisfaction factor varies depending on the sympathies of those surveyed: 88% of Podemos voters, for instance, are satisfied with the pacts that have been arrived at. Well, they would be. They've got a mayor in Madrid, Manuela Carmena, who achieved a 17.7% share of the vote - 287,000 actual votes: the Partido Popular scored twice as much on both counts but is now in opposition.

PP supporters, as with many PP politicians, including the Balearics' own José Ramón Bauzá, are distinctly unimpressed with the current system. 92% of PP voters believe that the party which obtains the most votes should govern, even if it fails to gain a majority. Well, they would. They now no longer have mayors or regional presidents who previously had achieved both the most votes and majorities, as with, for example, the Balearic parliament or Palma City Council.

It was instructive that before the regional election Bauzá was making noises about the most voted-for party having the right to govern (or at least be guaranteed to be part of a governing coalition). When he started making these noises, it was the first time it became clear that he knew how the result would turn out, though even he could probably not have predicted how bad the result would be. For public consumption, he had been saying the PP would get 25 seats: he was five out. 

This is not the first time that the electoral system has been exposed to criticism and it won't be the last, but the chances of it being changed are diminishing; not that the chances were ever great. Mariano Rajoy has wanted to make adjustments to give the most voted-for candidates and parties (his own) a better chance, but it would have run up against a problem: the need for a qualified majority in Congress.

For better or for worse, Spain and so its elections - national, regional, municipal - are governed by the D'Hondt system of proportional representation. That the PP and its supporters might not now find this system to be entirely to their satisfaction is, frankly, tough. They knew the rules. Everyone knew the rules. Presumably, they hadn't been complaining or calling for changes when they were winning ample majorities. Defeat through the chosen system is not a reason to change the system just because it has proved to be unsatisfactory in these elections for one particular party.

Even had there been a method whereby the PP in the Balearics would have automatically been given the chance to govern, it doesn't follow that they would have been able to. Bauzá, with more seats and a higher percentage share of the vote than any other party, might have demanded the right to remain as president, but there would still have been the investiture issue: the only way he (or a replacement for him from within the PP) could have been president was through a formal pact, and the only party which could have delivered this was PSOE. It was never going to happen.

The scrambling around to form pacts might appear confusing and even unseemly but it is nothing new. What is new is that there are two alternative and fairly strong political forces - Podemos and Ciudadanos. They have made the coalition process more complicated simply by their presence, but it is this very presence that makes a PP call for the most voted-for party to have a right to govern the more desperate and even rather despicable. The PP (and PSOE) have to accept that the results were as they were because new parties succeeded in diminishing their votes. Rather than criticise the system, they need to be self-critical: they fared as they did because the voters decreed that they deserved to. 

There is no perfect electoral system, only the least imperfect. First past the post isn't perfect and arguably it is well short of being the least imperfect. Prior to the British election, the London correspondent for "El País" said that Britain had a weird electoral system, that first past the post sounds like a board game. The Spanish, the Germans and others find Britain's system distinctly odd. Britons might find the Spanish system odd, as some Spaniards now find it not to their liking, but you'll never satisfy everyone, especially PP voters.