After a tumultuous year, Spanish politics returns to an uneasy status quo

It’s been exactly a year ago since Spain held what would turn out to be the first of two general elections in ten months. The first vote unleashed chaos: new parties Podemos (‘We Can’, on the radical left) and Ciudadanos (‘Citizens’, on the centre-right) split 35 per cent of the vote between them. This ended the joint hegemony of Spain’s two oldest parties, meaning it was time to say goodbye to a status quo established when Franco’s death inaugurated democracy in 1975 – a world in which the Conservatives and the Socialists simply swapped power back and forth. Everything had changed. Or had it?

After almost a year of antagonistic negotiations, the country’s new government was finally installed at the end of October: it’s a minority Conservative-led operation dependent on parliamentary votes for passing legislation. And it’s led, once again, by the widely-loathed veteran Mariano Rajoy. As demonstrated by the compromised nature of this administration, some things are unimaginably different in Spain from one year ago.