On July 23rd this year, Spaniards voted in the third inconclusive general election in the past four years, called by the country’s Socialist premier, Pedro Sànchez, after his party’s huge defeat in regional and local elections two months prior – a result widely described as a “right-wing tsunami” for the two main opposition parties, Partido Popular and Vox.
However, the two right-of-centre parties fell four seats short of being able to form a coalition government and subsequent majority, losing hundreds of thousands of votes to Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party after the government’s concessions to Basque and Catalan separatist parties made during the previous congress.
But the distribution of seats required the support of the Together for Catalonia (Junts) party, led by the former president of the government of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont – a party that historically had not supported the formation of Sánchez’s respective governments. The support of both Junts and the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) was conditional: that all of the participants (around 400) involved in the 2017 Catalan independence referendum, widely considered to have been unconstitutional, be granted amnesty – as well as the possibility of holding another independence referendum.
On 15 November, after weeks of negotiations with different parties culminating in the controversial pact between Junts and Sánchez, the Spanish premier was inaugurated before King Felip VI – declining to take his inaugural oath on the Bible.
Last Tuesday – less than a fortnight later – the Pope summoned all Spanish bishops to a meeting at the Vatican to discuss an early 2023 papal visitation report on the Church; Spain has seen a sharp decline in both attendance and vocations with under 1,000 diocesan seminarians for the first time in 21 years.
Sánchez has included several prominent Catholics in his new government – seen as an attempt to ease tensions with the Church which has openly criticised restrictive laws on religious education, liberalising abortion, euthanasia and gender self-identification. However, many Catholics in Spain regard this as a “washing” of his newly formed government, in anticipation of the chants of Te Deums and rosaries prayed among the protests, and what some consider as a veiled assault on the 1978 constitution – and Spain as a Catholic nation.
Hundreds of thousands have demonstrated throughout Spain, most notably in Madrid, in opposition to the new government.
Cardinal Juan José Omella, the Archbishop of Barcelona, said: “I’m asking political leaders and opinion-formers to do everything possible to ease tension – to work at all times for the general interest, favouring communion and what unites us”.
The archbishop conceded that any political pact that modified the status quo agreed by Spaniards in their constitution would provoke “division and confrontation, unless it enjoyed the support of all political forces and a qualified majority of society”. Perhaps a necessary formality, it is nonetheless inconclusive language: for one, Sánchez and his government would not claim to be doing anything other than working for the general interest, and secondly, it was a “qualified majority” – that being the electorate – who placed him in power once again.
Indeed, that majority is constituted by an overwhelmingly Catholic electorate. Neither is there a united Catholic opposition – politically or otherwise – to Sánchez. Members of Revuelta, a branch of Vox, as well as members of a nationalist group, “Noviembre Nacional”, prayed rosaries in front of the party headquarters in Madrid on 18 November and various Catholic associations have been present throughout. This is perhaps a reassuring recoil into apolitical, spiritual strength in the face of backroom – and arguably unconstitutional – politics, but others have seen this as utilising the faith for general demonstration under a collectivised notion of Catholic Spain, rather than specific objection to anti-Catholic policy.
Political demonstrations such as these by Catholics are common in Spain, especially in Catalonia – perhaps reassuringly so given how divided and complicated regional and national politics is.
(People pray the rosary during a gathering to pray for the unity of Spain in Barcelona on November 18, 2023 | PAU BARRENA/AFP via Getty Images)
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