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Spain Regional Parties
Spain's system of political parties was complicated by
the
existence of regional parties that were active both at the
regional level, and, when they had seats in the Cortes, at
the
national level (see
table 14, Appendix). In most
autonomous
communities, politics was dominated by regional affiliates
of one
of the two national parties, the PSOE and the AP, with the
PSOE
controlling the greater number of regions. In some of the
autonomous communities, however, these regional offshoots
had to
form coalitions with truly local parties if they wished to
govern. Only the Basque Country and Catalonia had regional
parties that were strong enough to set the political
agenda; the
most important were the PNV and the Catalan electoral
coalition;
Convergence and Union (Convergència i Unio--CiU). These
two
moderately right-wing parties routinely won seats in the
Cortes,
and the CiU did well enough in regional elections to
govern
Catalonia, if it chose, without the aid of coalition
partners. It
was also the only regional party that had a decisive role
in
politics on the national level. This foremost exponent of
Catalan
nationalism occasionally supplied important parliamentary
support
to the UCD in the late 1970s. By far the second most
important
party in Catalonia was the regional offshoot of the PSOE,
the
Socialists' Party of Catalonia (Partit dels Socialistes de
Catalunya--PSC).
The Catalan party system in general was characterized
by
pragmatism and by moderation. By contrast, the Basque
national
parties were beset by polarization, fragmentation, and
political
violence. In 1986 a group of PNV dissidents, unhappy with
both
the party's economic conservatism and its willingness to
cooperate with the PSOE's stern antiterrorist measures,
split
from the party to form the more radical organization named
Basque
Solidarity (Eusko Alkartasuna--EA). In addition, there
were two
more extreme Basque nationalist groups, the Basque Left
(Euskadiko Ezkerra--EE) and the HB. The more radical of
these was
the HB, which included Marxist-Leninist revolutionary and
ultranationalist groups and which was closely linked to
the ETAM . The party emphasized social revolution and armed
struggle for
Basque independence. The EE party was believed to be tied
to the
less violent ETA Political-Military Front (ETA
Politico-Militar--
ETA-PM)
(see Threats to Internal Security
, ch. 5). These
nationalist parties almost invariably won seats in the
Cortes.
Data as of December 1988
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