Understanding the Two-Party System in Spanish Politics
System Performance CANOVISTA: To achieve peaceful development of political life, a liberal left was needed to accept the new monarchy. It was necessary to create two major parties alternating in power within a constitutional legality. Each party had to wait their turn in a constitution. Beside the conservative party, the Cánovas liberal party of Sagasta was created. Both were called “dynastic parties.” The bipartisanship was a substitute for military statements. The base of the system was a bipartisan agreement that the two political forces had arrived on the basis of the system to defend the monarchy, the Constitution, private property, and a centralized unitary liberal state. The switching mechanism to ensure a peaceful electoral system was corrupt and manipulated. The alternation functioned democratically from top to bottom because the results were determined by the government calling an election. The systematization of fraud and political corruption were the foundations of the system. The government depended on the will of the king. It is exactly the opposite of a parliamentary system: the Courts are dependent on the government to call an election. To ensure the alternation, it was necessary to control the electoral process to obtain the most played game at that turn. The system only allowed entrance to the dynastic parties and chased the opposition parties.
The Two-Party System: A Vicious Circle
- 1. The government could not continue because it had problems, was worn out, or had lost the confidence of the king and the Cortes.
- 2. Given the situation, the king calls the leader of the opposition party to form the government and awards the decree dissolving the Parliament.
- 3. The new government holds elections.
- 4. The preparation of the electoral process begins: a law voting in favor and dismissing the administrative-political positions of the other party and putting its own in place because it had won.
- 5. Preliminary negotiations between the two dynastic parties determine the candidates who will come out in each constituency. It was the Government Minister who did the negotiations and sent the list to the civil governors, who were the middlemen. Stresses the need for cuneros (members of the Executive) to pigeonhole rural districts controlled by the government in order to ensure a seat. They have no link with the constituency but are unaware of the issue.
- 6. The electoral fraud: it is systematic fraud and adulteration of the election results through all sorts of illegal practices: counterfeit census, manipulation or destruction of electoral acts, buying votes, threatening the electorate, etc.
- 7. For that system, officials necessitated cooperation from the oligarchy and caciquismo for the whole mechanism to start and win the election, thus perpetuating the system.
- The Oligarchy: The minority political leader is comprised of two men from parties that normally reside in Madrid, where they weave a network of influences.
- The Caciquismo: Survival is a kind of feudal manor or part without institutional power in general, dominating and controlling the main levers of power in rural areas. The chiefs of each area prepare all the electoral intrigue in their districts. The boss is a character who is identified with a rich and influential woman working directly or indirectly with much of the county population, who become customers and voters subject to surrendering their interests. The warlords controlled lifetime control of local councils.
- 8. With this corrupt election intrigue, the necessary majority to govern was achieved. When the new government began to trouble the turn of the other party, it had already arrived.
Organized: Politicians in Madrid, the boss in each county, and the governor of each province in the capital are the three key pieces in the actual system operation. Behind all was the Minister of Interior, in charge of organizing and controlling the entire electoral machinery. The system ensured that the people’s opinion and their vote were not crucial when choosing their representatives. The decision was taken before the election process began. The electorate is passive due to systematic distortion. The rural districts represented 80% of the total votes. The votes of the urban districts, representing 20%, are distributed to their seats among the opposition and dynastic parties. The whole system relies on the votes of illiterate rural Spain, where decisions were easily influenced by financial hardships that the boss had summoned. The party elections left a reasonable number of seats for the game of the opposition. The political system could not function properly without opposition, so the government manufactured it with the same care with which it built its majority. The systematic and institutionalized corruption spread to all areas of life, enabling Spanish sociopolitical dynamics and perpetuating the system.
RATING: The Restoration brought stability to Spanish political life, which is morally questionable, but the system used systematic distortion to gain promotion due to oligarchic power. It articulated a peaceful alternation in a very stable system capable of dealing with the social and political problems of this period, which ultimately worked to disaster in ’98. Conservatives and liberals agreed on a system of democratic appearance. It was an oligarchic system because most of the population remained on the sidelines. This system allowed political life without shocks but left the people out. Time became a routine that would ankylosing the system and disassociate it from social reality: a distance between real Spain and official Spain. It was a valid arrangement for politicians but for the people who stayed on the sidelines. It was purely a political system that forgot social problems.
In Short: The Restoration was a system that failed due to its inability to evolve and renew itself because it was an oligarchic and corrupt system that marginalized most of the population. The moral weakness of a regime based on the systematic distortion of a Constitution that it had pledged to observe was evident. It was a democratic political system in theory, but in practice, it functioned as an oligarchy.