AUTHOR=Rama José , Cordero Guillermo , Zagórski Piotr 

TITLE=Three Is a Crowd? Podemos, Ciudadanos, and Vox: The End of Bipartisanship in Spain

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Political Science

VOLUME=Volume 3 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2021.688130

DOI=10.3389/fpos.2021.688130

ISSN=2673-3145

ABSTRACT=The traditional Spanish imperfect bipartisanship and the alternation in power emerged in the early 80s between the centre-left PSOE and the conservative PP has shifted towards a multiparty system after the emergence of three new parties. At first, as a result of the economic and political representation crises, Podemos (We Can), emerged at the 2014 European Parliament elections. This left-wing populist party managed to grow rapidly among the dissatisfied voters, reaching the third electoral position in the 2015 general elections. In the same contest, the liberal centre party Ciudadanos (Citizens) became the fourth political force boosted, among other reasons, by notorious corruption scandals involving high-rank PP’s officials and the process of secession in Catalonia. Finally, driven by the same secession process and thanks to the removal from office of PP’s Prime Minister after a motion of no confidence, the support for the populist radical right Vox also experienced a boost, winning 15 percent of the seats in Parliament in the general elections of November 2019. In this paper, we describe the contexts which facilitated the irruptions of these new parties, analyse their impact on the Spanish party system and study their current voters’ profiles.