What would a Spain without Catalonia be like? “Incomplete”, some would say. "More authentic", others would reply. Fictional politics admits an infinite variety of institutional scenarios if the starting point is referred to 1640 or 1714. But the electoral scenario is easier to imagine: you only have to discount the Catalan results of a few representative elections. And the resulting outcomes –starting with that of 23-J– would be very different. For example, the current congressional table would not be chaired by a socialist deputy, since PP and Vox would add an absolute majority.
However, things have not always been this way. The influence of Catalonia as a disruptive factor in the Spanish scenario grew from the moment the territorial and identity dialectic burst into the Spanish electoral contest. It is a political weapon that, in terms of voting, has provided as many returns as losses to the various formations that have used it. But before the territorial vector acquired such a decisive role, the electoral weight of Catalonia was somewhat less decisive, beyond its own party system and its leaning to the left.
In fact, in the 1977 elections, the influence of the Catalan vote forced the UCD to have a Popular Alliance in order to gain an absolute center-right majority in Congress (although Adolfo Suárez preferred to explore the center and rely on the seats of Pujol or Basque and Catalan Democrat Christians). However, discounting the Catalan result and in a Congress of just over 300 seats, the UCD would have garnered an absolute majority on its own: 156 deputies (see graphs). And something similar would have happened with the results of 1979.
By contrast, the Catalan denouement weakened the PSOE's absolute majority in 1982 and 1986, and helped leave the Socialists with only half the seats in the Chamber in 1989. Without Catalonia's votes, the Socialists' advantage would have been somewhat greater. comfortable in the first two legislative elections of the 80s and would have reached a scratch majority (154 deputies in a Congress of 304 seats) in the 1989 appointment. But everything changed from 1993.
Since that year, the weight of Catalonia has been decisive in the result of a good part of the elections in which no party obtained an absolute majority. And almost always for the benefit of the left. For example, in 1996, the bitter victory of the PP (which fell 20 seats short of an absolute majority) would have been much sweeter without the Catalan result. In this case, the popular ones would have been only five seats away from an absolute majority, which they could have completed with the PNV or with the Canarian insularists and the Valencian regionalists.
Likewise, the absence of the Catalan vote would have strengthened, in the 2000 elections, the first absolute majority of the PP (going from a margin of 7 to 18 seats). And most importantly: despite their lies about the worst terrorist attack in contemporary Spain, the Populares would have tied with the Socialists in 2004 without the result in Catalonia. In this hypothesis, the votes of the PNV would have been decisive so that the left could govern. And the same would have happened in 2008, with the relevant nuance that, without the Catalan vote, the Popular Party would have been two seats ahead of the PSOE.
Along the same lines, without Catalonia, the PP's absolute majority in 2011 would also have been strengthened (from ten to 23 seats above half plus one in the Chamber). But the decisive role of the Catalan vote would reappear in the 2015 elections, with the fragmentation of the political map and the irruption of new formations. In that year's elections, PP and Ciudadanos (whose space would surely be occupied by UPyD in a Spain without Catalonia) fell 13 seats short of an absolute majority, practically tied with the left.
But without the Catalan result, popular and orange would have been above the absolute majority: 153 seats out of a total of 303. Consequently, there would have been no electoral repetition, although if it had occurred, the outcome would have further strengthened the majority from the right, up to 158 seats. And that means that the motion of no confidence in the spring of 2018 would have had no chance of succeeding and Pedro Sánchez would never have reached the presidency.
Returning to the real world, the 2019 elections were also highly marked by the result in Catalonia. In April, the left was ten seats short of an absolute majority, and the right to 27. But without the Catalan vote, and although the sum of the PSOE and Unidas Podemos would have been only five deputies short of the majority, the right would have reduced the distance from 27 to ten. And in November, the outcome would have been even tighter: discounting the Catalan vote, the right-wing bloc would have taken the lead (five seats from the majority in the Chamber), while the left would have remained 13.
Finally, in the elections on July 23, the absence of Catalonia would have led PP and Vox to add 162 deputies; nothing less than ten above the absolute majority (which would be 152 in a Chamber of 302 seats). Of course, it could be argued that, without the Catalan dispute, the territorial discourse of the right would lose steam. But, as the municipal elections in May demonstrated, the alternative (visibly effective) could be to revive the ghost of ETA (which "is still alive", according to the leaders of the PP). The motto of the conservative universe seems to always be the same: "There will be no peace until we recover power." The problem is that there isn't any afterwards.
