Two iron blocs: rules that reward agreement in Spain's polarised politics

When Miriam González launched Democracia 21 in Madrid on 10 October, one line got more attention than the rest. Spain, she said, cannot carry on with two iron blocs and nothing that favours consensus. People are tired, she added, of voting while holding their nose and then watching everyone do the same things. We've mapped the whole speech elsewhere; this is our answer to that problem.

The data backs the diagnosis. Juan León and Lluís Orriols found in 2020 that Spain shows one of the highest levels of affective polarisation among advanced democracies, meaning how much voters dislike the other side. For EsadeEcPol, Orriols used CIS surveys to show that the gap between how likely Spaniards are to vote for parties of their own bloc and for those of the other grew by 50% between 2000 and 2019, from 5.3 to 7.8 on a ten-point scale. His conclusion is the most useful sentence written on the subject: bloc polarisation may make governments more stable, at the price of unstable public policy. The first casualty is the cross-party agreement solid enough to last.

The 2023 cycle showed both sides of that. Alberto Núñez Feijóo lost his investiture vote 172 to 178. Pedro Sánchez won his in November with 179 votes against 171, every vote from one bloc or its allies. And the judiciary's governing council, which needs three-fifths of each chamber, spent more than five years with an expired mandate until the PSOE and the PP signed its renewal in Brussels in June 2024, with a European Commissioner in the room.

Why the incentives point apart

Spain's rules mostly reward winning. Investiture under Article 99 of the Constitution needs an absolute majority in the first vote and a simple majority 48 hours later. The constructive motion of censure in Article 113 needs an absolute majority behind an alternative candidate. Both make a leader's priority clear: gather 176 votes inside your bloc. The rules that do require agreement, the three-fifths majorities for the judicial council and the Constitutional Court, have no deadline and no fallback, so blocking costs nothing. We've called that vetocracy.

The comparative evidence suggests rules matter. Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne studied 76 election surveys across 20 countries and found that political systems which foster power-sharing between parties show markedly less affective polarisation.

Four rules that make agreement pay

Each tradition has a reason to want this. The left knows that big social goals, decent pensions, good public services, need pacts that survive changes of government; the Toledo Pact on pensions, approved by Congress in April 1995, is the Spanish proof, and we've written about it as a grand bargain. The right and the market tradition want policy stability and legal certainty so people and firms can plan, and they know that market mechanisms often deliver public goals more cheaply. What fits neither camp is John Rawls's overlapping consensus, turned into procedure: rules under which each side can back the same institution for its own reasons, so that agreement stops being a truce and starts paying.

A register of cross-bloc agreements. Denmark runs much of its policy through political agreements between the government and opposition parties. Lex.dk explains that they aren't legally binding, yet breaches are rare, and that the parties to an agreement typically must all consent to change it. Agreements made across the middle can last many years through changes of government; in 2021 the Finance Ministry counted 115 in force. Spain could create the same thing by parliamentary rule: an agreement signed by groups from both blocs is registered, its budget lines are protected until its review date, and changes need its signatories. It costs nothing to set up and gives every party a reason to be inside the deal.

A deadline and a default for every appointment. Keep the three-fifths majorities for the judicial council, the Constitutional Court and the regulators. Add a fixed deadline and a fallback that neither bloc prefers, for example appointment by lot from a shortlist drawn up by an independent panel. Blocking then stops being a free option.

A fast track for bills sponsored across both blocs. Any bill co-sponsored by groups that include deputies from both sides, above a threshold, gets guaranteed plenary time and a fixed calendar. The governing majority still controls most of the agenda; a cross-bloc minority gets a lane of its own.

Packages in Matthew Miller's style. In The Two Percent Solution (2003), Miller argued that America's big problems needed grand bargains in which each side wins something it cares about. Universal health coverage, for example, delivered through tax subsidies for private insurance; better pay for teachers alongside experiments with school vouchers. Spain's biggest disputes, housing above all, have the same structure. A package that pairs public investment in affordable housing with faster permits and land release gives both blocs a goal to claim. The register above is where such packages would live.

None of this asks Spaniards to stop disagreeing. Rawls's point is that free people will always disagree about deep things. The rules can still make sure that, on pensions, judges or housing, the two blocs find it worth more to sign than to block.