Losing Its Soul: The Changing Role of Christian Democracy in the Development of Spain's New Right

Abstract

Christian Democrat parties have never enjoyed much success on their own in Spain at national level. They existed only briefly before the Civil War in the 1930s and failed to make much of an impact after democracy was restored following the death of General Franco in 1975. However, politicians with a Christian Democrat background featured prominently in the centrist and right-wing alliances that emerged during the democratic transition and in the relaunch of the centre-right as the Partido Popular (PP) in 1989. Since then, PP leader José María Aznar has used the Christian Democrat element in the PP to develop close links with the European People's Party (EPP) and increase his own international standing, transforming both the EPP and the Christian Democrat International into organizations that reflected his own particular centrist views. In the process, Christian Democracy lost its original ideological edge, becoming just another strand in the gradual configuration of a new democratic right. Traditionalists would say that it simply lost its soul.

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