We Spaniards are dual. Either believers or atheists. Either meat or fish. Either siesta or going to bed early. Either beer or wine.
Politics is not free from this characteristic, in such a way that we are either right-wing or left-wing and that is how we have functioned in this last stage of our history, the stage of democratic alternation that began in 1979.
PSOE and PP-UCD have been the poles that have politically directed Spain for 40 years, the first 21 years and the second 19. This duality has made Spain progress in a way that has never happened before, which concludes that the antagonistic political duality of Spanish society works more or less well.
And I say more or less because one thing is the spectacular change in socio-economic indicators from those in 1979 to those in 2018, especially in reducing the differential of these indicators that we had and that we now have with those that existed and exist today in the most advanced countries in the world, and another thing is whether the current situation in Spain is viable or not.
In any case, the viability of Spain in 2018 is not the object of this opinion article, but rather to gauge the health of the political parties that have been the protagonists of 40 years of alternation, the PSOE and the PP. If we resort to demoscopy, we can clearly see that both political forces are collapsing and tending towards electoral irrelevance. This irrefutable demoscopic fact leads me to think that Spaniards are more weighed down by the mistakes made by the PSOE and the PP than by their undoubted contribution to the change, with respect to the countries around us, that has taken place in Spain in the last four decades.
What mistakes are sinking the PSOE and the PP? To sum up a lot, the unforgivable mistake of the former is to have ruined Spain the two times it has governed. Both Felipe González and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero left the Spanish economy devastated and condemned millions of Spaniards to long periods of suffering. The unacceptable mistake of the PP has been to turn its back on its political ideology and thereby leave millions of ideological orphans without knowing who to vote for.
Faced with this lamentable reality, there are new political forces that are emerging with the direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious, objective of occupying the electoral spaces that PSOE and PP are gradually leaving empty. Ciudadanos was born in 2006 and in 2008 Albert Rivera defines it as "social democrat occupying a center-left space", exactly the same as the PSOE! See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3exMYQVP5A4
Since those statements by the leader of Ciudadanos in 2008, that party has been maneuvering specifically according to each circumstance with the aim of occupying I didn't know what electoral space, that is, like a chicken without a head. It is time for him to correctly design his strategy because, as I have stated at the beginning, we Spaniards are dual and we cannot all fit in the same space; not recognizing this is making a serious a priori mistake. Logically, the space to be occupied by Ciudadanos is derived from what Albert Rivera defined 10 years ago, the same space that the PSOE leaves.
As for the PP and the space that it is leaving free, it being obvious that it cannot be occupied by a party like Ciudadanos that defines itself as "social democrat occupying a center-left space", only a party like VOX can occupy it. And only VOX can occupy the space that gave 11 million votes to the PP in 2011 because only VOX holds the ideological essence that the PP had to which the Spanish people turned to save Spain from the second ruin of the PSOE.
I cannot avoid referring to the common factor that, definitively, causes both PSOE and PP not to be able to, even if they want to, get rid of the panorama that I foresee, that bipartisan Ciudadanos-VOX panorama: Corruption.
The corruption that has affected the PSOE and the PP is so brutal, in fact, no other political party in Europe has been the protagonist of the corruption that the two Spanish parties have starred in, that both are condemned to their disappearance as the minimum moral price to pay. We Spaniards are going to continue to be dual and, in politics, we will put our most immediate future in the hands of Ciudadanos and VOX, it being essential for this to happen that Albert Rivera does not try to eat the whole cake, because he may choke.
