Europe | Memo From Spain

Discord Pushes Spain Into Fifth Month With No Government

By RAPHAEL MINDERAPRIL 25, 2016

Mariano Rajoy, the acting prime minister of Spain, during a debate in Parliament this month. Pierre-Philippe Marcou/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MADRID — Belgium famously sealed a dubious notoriety five years ago when it spent 589 days without an elected government. While Spain is not quite Belgium yet, it is getting there.

Spain has started its fifth month without a government, but it is very likely to spend six months or more in political limbo, many analysts now predict, as the Spaniards give the Flemings and Walloons a run for their money in the political discord category.

One word that seems to come up a lot these days when discussing politics is circo (or circus).

After an election in December produced no clear winner, scattering votes among the four main parties, those parties have failed to negotiate a governing coalition. As the politicians squabble incessantly, about the only consensus is that the country has entered uncharted waters.

Mariano Rajoy, the former prime minister, is clinging to his office as acting prime minister after turning down an offer from the king to form a government. His government ministers refuse to recognize the Parliament that resulted from the election or even deal with its lawmakers. The new Parliament has taken the government to court for not recognizing its legitimacy, while not recognizing the legitimacy of Mr. Rajoy, either.

That is where things stand.

It was not supposed to be this way. A new generation of party leaders had promised that the December vote would usher in a period of change and constitutional reform.

Instead, Spain is verging on constitutional crisis. The order of the day is institutional sclerosis, a lot of posturing and “generally a moment of great confusion,” said Rubén Amón, a columnist for El País, a Spanish newspaper.

“Politicians have given a very bad image in which all party leaders have put their own personal survival ahead of the general interest,” Mr. Amón said.

It is not as if public perceptions of the politicians could sink much lower in a country where virtually every party has been caught up in corruption scandals in recent years. But the nearly complete undermining of the public’s faith in its political institutions may be about the only thing achieved since the start of the year.

This month’s parliamentary debating was a case point. The session on April 6 was supposed to give lawmakers an opportunity to challenge Mr. Rajoy on why his government had backed a controversial European Union agreement to have Turkey take back unwanted refugees.

But humanitarian considerations quickly gave way to far more personal tensions between the leaders of Spain’s two emerging parties — Albert Rivera of Ciudadanos, or Citizens, and Pablo Iglesias of the far-left Podemos.

The two men, in their 30s, have presented themselves as a new generation of Spanish politician. But the new generation looked every bit like the old one, as they hurled accusations of cronyism.

It was part of what Luis María Anson, a veteran journalist, called “a depressing show” since the December election. Spanish politics, he argued in a recent column in the newspaper El Mundo, has become “a circus ring in which every day acrobatic leaders make ridiculous pirouettes to the stupefaction of citizens.”

Manuel de la Rocha Vázquez, an adviser to the Socialist party, suggested that the flamboyant sparring had become unavoidable in an era of round-the-clock news coverage.

“There is a lot of demand for information and statements, and politics turns into a big theater, with lots of news conferences and interviews but very little substance,” he said.

But while most lawmakers have tried to hog the news media’s attention, Mr. Rajoy and his acting government have been conspicuous in their absence, a pattern of aloofness that began even before the election, when the prime minister refused to debate most of his opponents.

Four of his ministers have refused to appear before parliamentary committees to defend recent decisions, arguing that an acting government need answer only to the Parliament that elected it, not a new assembly whose survival prospects are dim.

The last refusenik, José Manuel Soria, in any case was forced to resign as industry minister days later, after being linked to the Panama Papers and offshore business activities. Mr. Rajoy, in turn, has refused to discuss before lawmakers Mr. Soria’s demise.

Opposition politicians, predictably, have latched on to the government’s lack of accountability.

“The acting government must more than ever be subject to parliamentary control, because its legitimacy is diminished,” Pedro Sánchez, the Socialist leader, told Parliament recently. “An acting government isn’t a government out of control.”

Feeling shunned, the lawmakers voted this month to take the government to the Constitutional Court of Spain over its refusal to recognize them fully.

The paralysis is not without consequence. Important challenges loom.

The regional government in Catalonia is forging ahead with a plan to secede from Spain. And Brussels recently warned about Spain’s deteriorating public finances, after Madrid missed its 2015 deficit target.

The leadership vacuum has also translated into legal uncertainty, as opposition politicians have pledged to scrap several proposals introduced by Mr. Rajoy. These include educational and labor legislation, a new solar energy tax and a measure to restrict the right to stage public protests.

This week, King Felipe VI will hold a final round of consultations to see whether the deadlock among party leaders can be broken. If not, a new election in June is inevitable.

But the disenchantment is such that analysts predict many Spaniards will not even bother to vote.

Francesc Homs, a Catalan separatist lawmaker, said he expected a 10 percent drop in turnout. In October, neighboring Portugal also held an inconclusive election, he noted, but then formed a new government within two months.

“Nobody has had to repeat elections like this,” Mr. Homs said. “So I’m sure that if this happens, it will trigger a higher level of concern around Europe and internationally.”

Clara Alfaro, a shoe designer in Madrid, said that if it came to a new election in June, she would vote if only “because this situation somehow has to be unblocked.”

“If this was a country where politicians really cared about the functioning of Spain, there would have been an agreement by now,” she said.

José Gómez, an architecture student and activist with the Podemos party, described the recent coalition talks as “just a joke.”

After the December election, all the party leaders “knew that they were too stuck in their ways to form any government,” he said. “So it’s just about organizing a circus until the next ones.”

Correction: April 25, 2016
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of the headline with this article misstated how long Spain has gone without a government. It is into its fifth month, not pushing toward its fourth.