Spanish election: The forgotten regions could decide who wins

TERUEL, Spain — Tomás Guitarte belongs to a land that Madrid purposely forgot.

During most of the 62-year-old architect’s life, successive Spanish administrations ignored his home province of Teruel, a rugged chunk of the Aragón region located in the heart of northeastern Spain.

The refusal by national authorities to invest in Teruel has starved the area, leading its population to shrink in the span of 100 years from 264,062 inhabitants in 1920 to just 134,505 today — a period in which Spain’s population more than doubled.

“They just gave up on us,” Guitarte said. “Decided we weren’t worth the effort and hoped we would just disappear.”

Today, Teruel is having its revenge.

Since 2019, Teruel Existe (“Teruel Exists”), a hyper-local political party led by Guitarte, has become an unlikely power player in Spanish politics. Most notably, without its support, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wouldn’t have been able to form the country’s first coalition government four years ago.

The party’s political strategy: It rejects conventional ideological debates and focuses on securing infrastructure and services for Teruel’s long-neglected constituents. In doing so, it has become a model for regional movements in other parts of so-called España vacía (“empty Spain”) — interior regions that have declined as the country’s population gravitated toward Madrid or prosperous coastal cities like Barcelona and Valencia.

As Spain heads to the polls Sunday, movements like Teruel Existe are poised to make further gains in Spain’s increasingly fractioned political landscape. With neither Sánchez’s Socialist Party nor the center-right Popular Party projected to gain outright majorities, it may once again be up to parties like Teruel Existe to determine Spain’s political fortunes.

‘Destined to be depopulated’

Geographically located in a fertile area halfway between four major Spanish cities — Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza and Valencia — one can imagine a scenario in which Teruel could have been a major intersection for trade in the country’s northeast.

But throughout the 20th century, as centrally-minded authorities sought to link all of Spain’s territories to the central government in Madrid with highways, railways and public service infrastructure, the province was conspicuously sidestepped.

Driving across the countryside outside the province’s eponymous capital — which with just 35,900 inhabitants is the smallest in Spain — Guitarte pointed to a once handsome, stone a brick train station that lies in ruins.

“That’s station was meant to service a railway line that was supposed to link Andalucía with France, passing right through Teruel,” he said. “The authorities built tunnels, bridges, train stations, but they never bothered to put in the railway tracks … At some point they just changed their mind and abandoned it, abandoned us.”

Guitarte said that during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship that the rare national politician who bothered to drop in on Teruel would only do so to remind local communities that they were condemned to go extinct.

“At a speech at a school here in the 1970s, an education minister told us it was important for us to study hard so that way we’d add value to the other Spanish regions to which we’d inevitably migrate,” he recalled.

Spain’s transition to democracy didn’t dampen the national disdain toward rural Teruel.

“In 1992, when Spain was spending millions on urban infrastructure for the Barcelona Olympic Games and building a high-speed railway to connect Madrid with the World Fair grounds in Seville, then-Minister for Transportation Josep Borrell [the EU’s current High Representative for Foreign Affairs] told us that it made no sense for the state to invest in territories like Teruel, which are destined to be depopulated.”

Fed up with the systematic neglect, in 1999 locals formed the Teruel Existe movement, named to ironically emphasize the province’s invisibility within Spain. 

Guitarte said that the movement stood out from the country’s Basque or Catalan regional parties, which have nationalist platforms, because it had never flirted with separatism and always identified itself with Spain.

“We’re not asking for anything special for us, just to be treated the same as everyone else, as is guaranteed by the Spanish Constitution, which explicitly lists territorial balance and equal opportunities as fundamental principles.”

For more than a decade, even as the movement swelled in membership, Guitarte said that its success was limited. “Politicians were delighted to meet with us, nod vigorously when we expressed our demands, decry the sorry state of things,” he said. “But that was it: They’d pose for a picture, give us a pat on the back, and not actually do anything to address our needs.”

The turning point came four years ago, when Spain held elections that resulted in a hung parliament. As the country prepared to hold a new vote, Teruel Existe decided to evolve from a popular movement to a political party.

“We barely campaigned — we had no money to do so,” said Guitarte. “But we all know each other here, and two decades of mobilizations had proven to people that they could trust us to fight for them in Madrid, and that’s how we beat the conventional parties and got a seat in parliament.”

Teruel Existe’s willingness to negotiate with all parties has not made its time on the national stage easy. In exchange for clear commitments to unblock numerous infrastructure projects in his region, Guitarte voted in favor of Sánchez’s left-wing coalition — and received death threats as a result.

Forging additional deals throughout this legislature, which saw polarization increase, has also been complicated.

“What’s most surprised me about the people in the parliament is that when we have to try to address a problem, the big political parties are usually only interested in seeing how they can use that challenge to attack their opponents,” he said. “We just want to solve problems and sometimes people react badly when you don’t agree to join them on the attack.”

Guitarte’s determination to “build bridges” with all political parties has paid off — literally. Over the past four years, Teruel Existe has gotten the central government to invest €290 million in updating the province’s ancient railway line and to commit to building a direct connection to Madrid.

Additional funding has been secured for highways, new museums and outposts of Spain’s distance-learning university. And the party not only convinced the government to reverse plans to shutter manned ticket booths in train stations across Teruel, but to additionally move the state-owned railway’s Digital Competence Center to the province, bringing new, highly-skilled jobs.

Unlikely kingmakers

For Sunday’s election, Guitarte has stepped aside to let 27-year-old Diego Loras take his spot as the candidate. The move is meant to highlight the long-term projection of the party and its ultimate goal of making Spain’s interior regions a viable alternative for the country’s younger generations.

At a campaign rally in the village of Alfambra, Loras, an economist by training, said that he was representative of so many other Turolenses who had been obliged to leave their homeland to attend university because their field of study was not offered at any of the centers located within the province.

Some nine in 10 of his graduating class moved away to study, he said. “Once you do that, you generally get an internship in that far-off city, start working, meet your partner, and it just becomes much more difficult to ever come back home,” he said. “We shouldn’t have to abandon our province in order to get an education and build a life.”

With polls indicating that he will almost certainly secure a seat in the next legislature, Loras said that he would continue pressing for the key services lacking in Teruel, especially in the realm of health care.

“Right now there isn’t a single place in this province where someone can receive radiotherapy, so people with cancer have to travel three hours to Zaragoza, undergo that brutal treatment, and then travel three hours to get back home,” he said. “We’re all Spaniards, we pay taxes here … How can we be forced to live in these conditions?”

Teruel Existe’s success has inspired parties like Soria ¡Ya! (Soria Now), which has sprung up to promote the rights of Spain’s least-populated province. Party leader Ángel Ceña said that local communities across Spain had understood that political representation was key to “obtaining the essential things we need to survive.”

“There are parts of Soria where you can’t even get a television signal, so you can imagine how it is with the internet: It hasn’t even made it to some towns,” he said. “Today, a high-speed connection is as essential to citizens as electricity and running water was in the 1960s … It’s shameful that it continues to be inaccessible in this region.”

Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III university, said that Spain’s polarized political landscape made it a good moment to be a regional party.

“Spain is fragmented right now: There is no single right, there is no single left, and that volatile context in which absolute majorities don’t exist means that smaller parties can gain unprecedented relevance,” he said.

Simón added that Spain’s electoral laws meant that thresholds for securing seats in the national parliament were relatively low in less populated parts of the country.

“In Madrid, a party needs around 100,000 votes to secure a seat in parliament, but in a place like Soria you can get by with around 18,000 votes; if Soria ¡Ya! performs as well as it did in the regional elections, it will make it in.”

Given the tightness of the election, regional parties could hold the key to the next Spanish government. 

Currently, there’s virtually no scenario in which Sánchez can govern without their support. Meanwhile, if the Popular Party wins enough seats in parliament, smaller parties could help it secure a minority government without having to rely on the far-right Vox party.

If that proves to be impossible, however, Teruel Existe’s Guitarte said that a hypothetical Popular Party-Vox coalition would never have his support.

“Vox is against everything we stand for: It defends a centralized state, wants to eliminate regional governments, pretends to support farmers but then supports deviating rivers to funnel water from the interior elsewhere,” he said. “Moreover, the party’s approach to gender-based violence and other issues is completely incompatible with us.”

“We stand for freedom, democracy and plurality; the bare minimum for making a deal with us is respecting those values,” he added.