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Stalemates and Extremes: Party Systems in Crisis
Multi-party systems are having trouble forming durable coalitions, while two-party systems are moving to the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.
When I moved to Barcelona in 2006, Spain was riding high, with no financial problems on the horizon. Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of the socialist PSOE party was on the news every day, bickering with conservative leader Mariano Rajoy of Partido Popular (PP) about seemingly trivial issues. Catalan independence was back then a fringe issue, and right-wing extremism was limited to small groups in Northern Europe.
But as I left Spain for Argentina at the end of 2009, things were getting tougher. The global economic downturn of 2008 had hit Spain and its housing bubble hard, recession was a reality and unemployment was on the rise even in the touristic wonderland of Barcelona that had always seemed disconnected from the economic reality of the rest of the Iberian Peninsula. In my work in retail, I had been receiving resumés from hopefuls–all of them college-educated–at 20 times the pace of previous years.
Things kept getting worse after that. Socialists lost power to PP, the crisis deepened and unemployment stayed on the rise until peak levels in 2013…
