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In-Depth Information
his coalition party
Convergència i Unió
(CiU) gained regional power - and proceeded to
dominatetheCatalanparliamentforthenextquarterofacentury.Inaway,thepro-conservat-
ive vote made it easy for the central government to deal with Catalunya, since the demands
forautonomyheredidnothavetheextremepoliticaldimensiontheyhadintheBasqueCoun-
try.
The 1980s and 1990s
The
elections of 1982
saw Felipe González' PSOE elected with a massive swing to the Left
in a country that had been firmly in the hands of the Right for 43 years. The
1986 general
election
gave González a renewed mandate, during which time Spain entered the
European
Community
,decidedbyreferendumtostayinNATOandboastedoneofthefastest-growing
economies in Western Europe. Barcelona's successful hosting of the
1992 Olympic Games
broughtthecitytoaglobalaudience,galvanizingitstourismindustryandsparkingaseriesof
developmentprojectsincludingtheradicalrestorationoftheoldtownandportareas.Narrow
victories in two more elections kept the Socialists in power, but after the 1993 results were
counted it was clear that they had failed to win an overall majority and were forced to rely
on the support of the Catalan nationalist coalition, CiU, to retain power. This state of affairs
well suited Jordi Pujol, who was now in a position to pursue some of the Catalan national-
ists' long-cherished aims, in particular the right to retain part of the region's own income-tax
revenue.
Following allegations of sleaze and the disclosure of the existence of a secret “dirty war”
against the Basque terrorists, the calling of a
general election in 1996
came as no surprise
and neither did the overall result. In power for almost fourteen years, the PSOE finally suc-
cumbed to the greater appeal of the conservative Partido Popular (PP), under
José Maria
Aznar
- the first conservative government in Spain since the return of democracy. However,
the PP came in well short of an outright majority, and Aznar was left with the same problem
as González before him - relying on the Catalan nationalists and other smaller regionalist
parties to maintain his party in power.
