Spain tilts a little to the middle

When Rosa Diez bolted from the ruling Socialist Workers Party six months ago and said she would run in elections with her own party, Spaniards thought she was nuts.

On Monday, a day after the election, Diez was basking in the achievement of a mini-miracle in Spanish politics: She attracted enough votes, to the tune of 300,000, to win a seat in parliament.

Analysts said they thought it was the first time in Spain’s 30-year-old democracy that a new party had done so well in its first electoral outing.

The Diez victory bucked the wider trend in Sunday’s balloting that saw the decline of smaller parties, especially those representing the far left or hard-line nationalism, whose votes mostly went to the Socialists. Voters, analysts said, were largely reaffirming Spain’s emerging bi-party system, composed of the victorious leftist Socialist Party and the right-wing Popular Party, which came in second in Sunday’s vote.

But many, exhausted by four years of acrid discord, also were searching for a middle ground, and that’s where Diez prospered.

Diez, 55, attributed her win to her offer of an alternative to the eternally bickering, deeply polarizing big parties. She represented what she called a “third Spain.”

“We don’t consider one-half of Spain to be the enemies of the other half of Spain,” she said Monday. “I hope these elections help the big political groupings regain their common sense.”

Diez left the Socialist Party of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero because she felt it had gone too far in promoting autonomy for Spain’s independence-minded regions and in pursuing liberal reforms without building consensus for such an ambitious program.

Her victory, she said, was remarkable since the highly politicized Spanish media largely ignored her and “you had to search through a bunch of papers” to find a ballot with her name and that of her Union, Progress and Democracy Party.

In reality, Diez won’t be able to do much with a single seat in the 350-member lower house of parliament. But she said she felt she had made a point.

The Socialists and the Popular Party, which between them took 84% of the vote, on Monday were assessing their ballot box performances with the same diametrically opposed visions that have characterized their confrontation of the last four years.

Both parties won more seats than in 2004, the last election, but the narrow margin between them remained virtually the same.

Senior Socialist Party official Elena Valenciano said the Popular Party’s defeat indicated public rejection of the political right’s “frontal and aggressive” way of waging opposition.

Angel Acebes, secretary-general of the Popular Party, said the Socialists could not have won without defections from more hard-line factions such as the United Left and a nationalist Catalan party.

The Socialists also did especially well in the Basque region. Zapatero’s government has been soundly criticized by the right for having contact with Basque militants fighting to secede from Spain.

Still, Zapatero heads into a second term forced to negotiate with smaller parties in order to govern and tackle a fast-declining economy, because he failed to achieve a majority in parliament.

The margin, Zapatero said in a news conference Monday, “is sufficient.”

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wilkinson@latimes.com